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Question Is changing Windows Power Plan a form of over-clocking?

Bruce

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Oct 8, 2017
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My 2 cents...

Changing your Windows Power Options to anything above Balanced should not be considered a form of over-clocking in my book.
And I'd be happy to hear your comments.

To be clear, I am not talking about changing your power management settings in BIOS, that is a form of over-clocking.

Over-clocking is when you change your hardware's clock rate, frequency, or voltage to increase performance.
No setting in Windows Power Options comes close to that level of control.
At best, you can change when devices go to sleep, and adjust min/max power states.
This does not increase performance per say, it stops devices from decreasing speeds or going into reduced power modes, in fact, all the settings relate to changing power draw.

One thing BIOS power management and Windows Power Options have in common is their ability to increase heat output when using high performance plans.
So yes, do something to counter for any heat increases.

The web site Windows Report has this article - https://windowsreport.com/windows-power-management-overclock/

In short, if there are benefits from using the High power plan, it is doubtful you'll notice it.
So stick to Balance unless you have a reason, like an external hard drive where you don't want the PC to power-off the USB port.
Equally, there is no harm in changing to a high performance plan either, just be aware you may need to dissipate more heat, especially on laptops.
 
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Couple of reasons why it is a form of OCing.

It often makes computers that do not need the extra bit of power unstable.

If there were no difference MS would not go to the trouble of making it available.

Gaming type notebooks that have a discrete GPU must have the High Performance setting else the GPU will not get the extra power to be able to function and the notebook will revert back to using the onboard video, this also the reason why gaming notebooks have to be powered from the wall socket via the AC adaptor.

Second paragraph in at the link;

Adjusting your power settings can give more power to your PC, but it will also generate more heart.

If boosting the power is not overclocking then I`m not sure what is.