If you’ve recently bought a pre-built gaming PC and you’re wondering how you can make sure you get the very best out of your system, then look no further! We’re here to bring you this guide which will teach you what settings you need to change or update within your system, whether it would be within Windows 10 under power plans, optimization settings, updating your graphics drivers, or installing utility software such as MSI Afterburner and optimizing your games within GeForce Experience for NVIDIA graphics cards and within Radeon Software for AMD graphics cards. If only just received your pre-built PC, then we would recommend checking out our Software updates guide for new PCs buyers first before you go through this guide.
We’ll start with the Windows setting called Power plan. Changing your power plan can improve speed on systems where hardware continually goes to and from an idle state, for example, when running a game, all your hardware will already be working together to populate the environment around you. The only real improvement in changing your power plan might come upon initial start-up which is beneficial for people who enjoy a super-fast boot time. If you are running video editing or 3D design software that is putting a heavy load onto your system’s hardware, then you might see a larger improvement in that department.
Now, depending on what chipset you’ve selected (AMD Ryzen or Intel) the option that you change to will affect pc performance greatly.
For AMD Ryzen systems, please head to AMD’s website and download your system’s latest chipset driver. Once installed, the chipset driver will give you access to the AMD Ryzen Balanced power plan. You can get to this by opening settings with Windows Key + I and then typing in choose a power plan. If you’ve installed the chipset driver, the option should then be available to select. The specifics on how this power plan helps Ryzen systems is that it reduces performance hits by keeping the physical cores awake which overall will improve your gaming experience.
For Intel, there should be another option called High Performance which we recommend selecting, however, if there is an ultimate performance power setting we recommend selecting that instead. Once again, this will improve your overall stability within Windows and your boot times upon turning your system on.
Another Windows setting that can be changed for a “best gaming experience” is Game Mode within settings. Press Windows Key + I and type in Game Mode. Switch the option to ON and it should then be enabled. Resources will be managed to achieve the optimum frame rate and additionally, Windows update will be suspended which will help you avoid your system automatically scheduling it to restart while pending an update to be installed.
Windows updates are recommended to ensure stability within your system, but preventing Windows updates from downloading and installing during active hours is recommended as mentioned above. This can be done by opening settings with Windows Key + I and clicking Update and Security > Windows Update. Click on Advanced options then click update options. Disable Restart this device as soon as possible when a restart is required to install an update, enable show a notification, and use Pause updates to delay the installation of updates for up to 35 days.
Graphics card drivers are highly recommended to update as soon as a driver is available, mainly due to it having the latest optimizations for games that you may be interested in playing. Having either GeForce Experience (NVIDIA GeForce graphics) or Radeon Software (AMD RX graphics) installed will allow you to easily update your driver through it, however, they also offer game optimization which is customized depending on your installed hardware.
For AMD hardware, optimization via the Radeon software interface is very straightforward and can be found within the cog (settings) on the far right and under graphics. There are a bunch of options that can be changed, but we highly recommend setting your profile to Gaming to ensure utmost performance and stability. For more information, please visit AMD’s website.
For NVIDIA hardware, optimization via GeForce Experience is fortunately also very accessible, and once logged in to the software you should be able to see all your compatible games. Click onto one to access the optimization interface and hit optimize. You’ll then have to launch the game via GeForce Experience to have the setting pre-applied when launched to ensure that the optimization is present during your gameplay.
Overall, we hope our guide has helped you optimize your pre-built PC for gaming. If you’re interested in looking at our other guides related to system optimization, we recommend checking them out, and let us know if you have any questions.
