There are two things in the PC building process you can't ever trust. First is the I/O shield fitting in on the first try, and the second is the BIOS settings your PC ships with. Luckily, you can fix both with a little bit of tweaking, tinkering and less than ten odd minutes of your time.

For most builders who aren't avid enthusiasts, the BIOS can seem like a confusing place that's reserved for tech support to fix things that are broken. However, modern BIOSes are surprisingly robust, user-friendly, and a few toggles that can only be found here can help you get the best value out of your components. Here are the four settings I change on every PC I build, whether it's for high-performance gaming or some very busy creative workflows.

Precision Boost Overdrive and Multi-Core Enhancement

Enable for performance, disable for efficiency

Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) on AMD Ryzen systems and Multi-Core Enhancement (MCE) on Intel platforms are both a form of automatic overclocking, which enable your motherboard to draw more power and sustain higher clock frequencies across all cores.

On many motherboards though, these settings can be found enabled by default, which means that your CPU may be running hotter and working harder than you intended it to. While a little extra performance is seldom not a nice-to-have, some builders with airflow-constrained small-form-factor (SFF) cases and those who prefer quieter and cooler builds might wish to keep these settings disabled.

Enable XMP/EXPO to get the advertised RAM speeds

You don't always get it out of the box

Enabling RAM overclocking often becomes a no-brainer for experienced builders, but the more obvious a toggle is, the more likely the odds of forgetting to do it. Without XMP (on Intel systems) and EXPO (on AMD platforms) enabled, your motherboard simply defaults the speed to the corresponding JEDEC standard, which is a much lower baseline for your DDR5 or DDR4 modules.

For example, it wasn't until a few weeks later that I found that my first PC was running the DDR4 modules at the default 2133 MHz instead of the possible 4000 MHz, which explained every underwhelming benchmark result I had scratched my head over in the weeks prior. Needless to say, Grand Theft Auto 5 and Fortnite finally started hitting the anticipated FPS after this small tweak.

Ditching the default fan speed curve

It works, but it can work better

Motherboard defaults can either run your case fans in a conservative "standard" mode that doesn't respond intelligently to thermal fluctuations, or an "auto" mode that overcorrects this by ramping up your case fans the moment temperatures nudge slightly upward. Both of these modes are suboptimal for any build and any form-factor, especially considering that your voltage regulator modules (VRM) and GPU rely a lot on consistent case airflow.

Thankfully, almost every modern motherboard will include a built-in fan curve editor that lets you map speed against temperature with just a few clicks. If you spend a few minutes setting this curve, you can have a PC that runs whisper quiet at idle, ramps up the fans gradually under moderate load (or perhaps the summer heat) and only hit full speed when it is warranted.

Enabling Memory Context Restore

Unless you like every boot taking forever

I've had my share of experience with PCs that are slow to boot, and I've had the same experience enough times to know that sitting at your desk and staring blankly at the boot screen is not something any user would enjoy. What's even worse is that even high-end systems with top of the line processors equipped with DDR5 memory kits aren't immune to the problem.

What happens is that every time you start up your system, your BIOS runs optimization process that tests the signal path between the CPU and the RAM, and the faster your memory modules, the longer it takes. This process is known as memory training.

Memory Context Restore (MCR) is the antidote to this problem. By enabling this setting in your BIOS, you're instructing your system to save the last known stable training setting so that your PC can skip the process on restarting, which can cut your boot times to anywhere between 40–90% at times. It applies to both AMD and Intel systems using DDR5 memory, so if you're on either and looking to save some time, this is the toggle you'd want to set as 'enabled'.

Getting the most out of your BIOS is getting the most out of your PC

What's worth noting is that every single one of the toggles listed improves or optimizes an essential aspect of your PC's performance, and therefore worth considering if you're setting one up for the first time ever. And if you're still worried about accidentally breaking something, it's also worth noting that all of these changes are reversible with a simple CMOS reset.