Laptops are now an essential part of almost all sectors and their importance during the Covid-19 pandemic attracted more people in buying a laptop according to their requirements. If you own an old laptop and need a little more boost in its functionality, you will find an easy way to enhance your laptop performance. Point to be noted that the performance settings reside in most laptops, usually via a preinstalled utility. However, you don’t need it, if your work on a laptop is email, web browsing, and mainstream productivity applications. But, you could unlock a free performance boost with a simple mouse click or button-push if you need to try a bit of light gaming, streaming, or video production. We encourage you to take advantage of that free performance. It is important that tinkering with these settings doesn’t turn a 4-core CPU into an 8-core CPU. It doesn’t make a low-end GPU into a high-end one.

Most laptops are very limited in the amount of power they can provide. Most vendors split the difference and pick a default setting that balances performance with cool running temperatures. It clearly indicates that there is usually some performance potential you could tap through the settings. For instance, an older MSI Prestige 14 designed for content creators. Its 10th-gen Core i7-10710U is a low-power chip. However, you’ll see a 10% performance increase in PCMark 10 overall general use if you change it from its out-of-box “Balanced” setting to “High Performance”. The High Performance setting nets you about a 15.5% improvement in PCMark 10’s Digital Content Creation. Point to be noted that performance benefits will vary depending on the task. Give that same MSI Prestige 14 a CPU-intensive HandBrake video encode and switch to High Performance, and it takes 30% less time to run.

The default settings for the older Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo gaming laptop, with its Core i9-10980HK and GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q, gives you an average performance result in UL’s 3DMark Time Spy Graphics test. You can set it to Turbo and get 29% faster performance in the same test. MSI’s is called Dragon Center. The one for Acer’s Predator gaming line is called Predator Sense. Asus keeps it in Armoury Crate. Dell houses the settings for the XPS line in the Power Manager utility. Acer’s Predator Triton 500 provides both a Predator key with the logo on it to access the utility and a clearly labeled Turbo button that cranks up fan’s speeds and GPU performance. XPG’s Xenia 15 features a button that allows you to switch among 3 performance profiles. Keep in mind that if you choose a higher performance setting, the laptop’s behavior will likely change.