AMD Ryzen Balanced Power Plan Now Available in Chipset Driver 17.10

AMD has announced a Ryzen-specific Balanced power plan for Windows 10 with their Community Update #3 several weeks ago with the intention of rolling the update out separately but now, AMD has incorporated it in their latest AMD Chipset driver version 17.10, compatible with Windows 10 x64. This update improves upon the default Windows balanced power management by reducing the timers and thresholds for P-state transitions to improve clockspeed ramping.

The default Windows balanced power plan also attempts to park all logical processors beyond the first 10% whenever possible. This means that on a 8C16T AMD Ryzen 7 1800X, logical processor 0 (physical core) and logical processor 1 (SMT core) stay awake, while the remaining 14 logical processors can be parked at any time. Resuming from a parked state has a latency cost that can affect performance, too. With the new Ryezn Balanced power plan, the hardware take full control more often and core parking has been disabled for more wakeful cores.

This Ryzen specific balanced power plan is set as default after the AMD Chipset Driver 17.10 is installed. According to AMD, which has been verified by several independent media now, the performance difference can be significant not just against the default Windows Balance option but sometimes even against the High-Performance preset as observed in Mafia III.

Download the AMD Chipset Driver Version 17.10 here: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/chipset?os=Windows+10+-+64