Intel's Arrow Lake is now available, and it's not quite what Intel or enthusiasts had hoped for. Even before the reviews came out, there were reports of instability issues, and the reviews painted a similar story with inconsistent performance. While we wait for Intel to come up with fixes, there are a few things that you can do easily that will gain some of the promised performance back. Most of these have to do with power issues, where either the BIOS or Windows isn't supplying enough when the CPU needs it. The silver lining is there is every chance that updates can and will fix many of these issues. Some are similar to the situation with AMD's Zen 1 processors, where Windows didn't quite know how to handle the new architecture, and it's our hope that Arrow Lake has a similar story. Until then, here's what you can set to try and recover Arrow Lake's performance.

4 Use the motherboard apps

Don't get frustrated trying to get fast RAM working

Setting up the BIOS of any new system can be daunting, with pages and pages of settings that you might not understand. It's tricky for seasoned PC builders too, and getting our RAM kit to boot with XMP enabled was proving to be difficult, until we tried the AI tool that Gigabyte created to figure out the correct RAM timings. After running Aorus AI Snatch, it spent a couple of minutes thinking about settings, then created an option in the BIOS menu to select. As soon as I rebooted into BIOS to select the new option of 8,933MT/s, and ensured the DRAM voltage was set correctly, the system booted on the first try. Before Arrow Lake, I was wary about using these types of utilities, but it looks like they're going to be more useful this time around, and on future motherboards as well.

3 Check all drivers are installed

It's never been more important to install everything

It's always a good idea to keep your computer's drivers updated, and that's never more true than when you're installing a new platform. Arrow Lake has more chipset drivers than I've ever had to install on Windows, with driver packages for the NPU and other new hardware parts all requiring their own driver package. That's a total of eight driver packages, when you used to have one, plus Intel Management Software. The easiest way to get all the correct drivers is by using the manufacturer's utility, whether that's Asus' Armoury Crate, Gigabyte's Control Center, MSI Center, or ASRock's Motherboard Utility. That will ensure you get all the packages you need, but watch out for the utility trying to install things you don't want, like trials of Norton 360.

2 Increase RAM voltage

The default 1.1V is too low for high XMP speeds

One thing we've noticed on some Arrow Lake motherboards is that when XMP is enabled, while the clock speed and timings get applied, the increased voltage that higher-speed DDR5 DIMMs need to run at those speeds isn't always set. You'll have to check the packaging of your RAM to see what voltage it wants for the XMP settings; on our 8,800MT/s Kingston CUDIMMs, it was 1.45V, a significant increase over the 1.1V that JEDEC specifies for DDR5.

Here's where you can find the XMP or EXPO settings on each motherboard manufacturer's BIOS.

• MSI: You'll find XMP on the OC menu under DRAM Setting, or it may be called A-XMP
• ASUS: Extreme Tweaker is what you want to look for, and a setting for AI Overclocking
• ASRock: Look for the OC Tweaker menu, which will have an entry for XMP or EXPO
• Gigabyte: Look for the Tweaker menu, which will have an entry for Extreme Memory Profi

While looking at that menu, there should also be a section nearby talking about voltages. Look for DRAM_VDD/VDDQ and set this to the value that your RAM manufacturer suggests for the XMP setting you chose. This was the only way we could get fast XMP speeds to boot on our test system, and it seems not to be manufacturer-specific, as multiple RAM kits had the same issue.

1 Change the power settings

You'll want the Best Performance setting

If you've been following PC hardware for a while, you might remember that first-gen Ryzen processors had issues in Windows when the power plan was set to balanced. The problem was the shift to chiplets, where Windows didn't know how to manage the CPU when the cores were in more than one cluster, and it seems that issue is happening again with Arrow Lake. It took many years and an interim Ryzen-specific power plan to fix the issue for AMD's chips, so we hope it doesn't take that long for Intel, but until a proper fix is rolled out there is one really simple thing you can do.

That's to change the "power mode" of your PC to Best Performance, which turns off some of the power-saving features that are losing Arrow Lake some performance points. To do so, head to the Settings app, open the System section and then select Power. Open the dropdown menu and select Best Performance. It's a quick fix, but in our testing, it brings back a significant percentage of benchmark performance.

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Arrow Lake has some teething problems, but these tips will help until official fixes arrive

The launch of Intel's Arrow Lake has gone anything but smoothly, with reports hitting before the new chips went on sale, saying there was an instability problem or two. We noticed some oddness during the testing of our two review samples, but nothing like BSODs or being kicked out of online matches. It's clear something is wrong, though, and it just depends on if it's a microcode and/or software issue, as we expect, or a deeper-reaching hardware issue. Until Intel has some clarity on these issues, the tips in this list will recover some performance losses.