Not a clickbait or a paid tool, there exists an overlooked turbo function in the Windows 11 settings capable of prompting your laptop to enhance its performance. The concealed gem lies in the Windows 11 Settings’ “power mode,” and we employed it for an evaluation on the Surface Laptop Studio 2. Merely by switching the power mode to “best performance,” we witnessed a remarkable 42% increase in the laptop’s performance in just one benchmark.
It’s a huge difference, and not just in numbers. In PCMark 10 alone, the increase pushed the Surface Laptop Studio 2 in our review from dead last in our comparison to the top spot.
- In PCMark, performance increased by 42 percent;
- In Cinebench R15, a general CPU benchmark, performance increased by 39 percent;
- In 3DMark , a general 3D graphics benchmark, performance increased by 14 percent;
- In Handbrake, a transcoding tool, the time to complete the task decreased by 24 percent.
These represent substantial enhancements, and they come without any cost. So, what’s happening here?
Within the Windows 11 Settings menu, go to System > Power & Battery, then scroll down to the “power mode” button. Here, you should see three power/performance options, capped them off with “Best performance.”
Microsoft, for some reason, ships virtually all if its Surface devices at the lowest settings, which it names “Recommended.” In the real world, Surface laptops tend to run whisper-quiet, with barely any fan noise.
The reason that the Surface Laptop Studio 2 is about a third of a pound heavier than the original Surface Laptop Studio is because of additional cooling. So Microsoft is adding weight to help keep the Surface Laptop Studio 2 cool and quiet.
Dialing up the performance slider dramatically increases the fan noise on the Surface Laptop Studio 2, which not everyone wants, including creatives who are deeply focused on the task at hand.
But what this also means is that you can take advantage of this, too. Adjusting your laptop’s performance slider should improve performance on it, too just not as much as with the Surface Laptop Studio 2. That’s because rival laptops often ship with the slider already at either the middle or the highest-performance setting to make them look better by comparison.
