The vast majority of people buy or build a PC, boot straight into Windows, and start using it immediately, under the impression that they're getting the performance promised to them by the reviews and specs they researched before purchasing. The truth is, a lot of what allows your PC to run to its full performance potential lies in the BIOS, the firmware that sits beneath your OS.

The BIOS can seem like a scary place to be if you're inexperienced with computers, but the settings within are really integral to your system's performance. The good news is, most of the settings that actually make a difference in performance aren't buried in there, and almost all of them require just one click to toggle on or off. None of the changes covered here require overclocking experience, and none of them involve manually pushing voltages or clock speeds beyond what your hardware is designed to handle. If you haven't touched your BIOS at all since you got your computer, chances are at least one of these settings is sitting at default, and those defaults leave performance on the table.

Enable XMP or EXPO

Even if you think it's already on, you should check it

This is arguably the single most common performance oversight in PC building, and it affects brand-new systems just as often as older ones. When you install a RAM kit rated for DDR5-6000 or DDR4-3600, that speed is not enabled automatically. Out of the box, your motherboard runs memory at a safe, conservative baseline, which is often DDR5-4800 or DDR4-2133, regardless of what you actually paid for. Running your memory at these JEDEC standard speeds can affect performance in both productivity and gaming workloads, especially in CPU-bound cases.

XMP, which stands for Extreme Memory Profile, is Intel's implementation of a standardized speed profile that's baked into the RAM itself. EXPO is AMD's equivalent. Enabling either one simply tells the motherboard to run the memory at the speed and timings the manufacturer intended and tested it at. It is technically an overclocking measure, but it's not turning the dials to anything your hardware wasn't necessarily rated for, it's just taking the chains off.

The location varies by manufacturer. On most boards, it lives under the primary "OC" tab, and often under a section for memory settings. Some manufacturers, like ASUS, place a toggle on the main page, so this change really can be done in a single click. Even if you're certain you already turned it on, it's worth it to go check. A CMOS clear or BIOS update can clear your previous configurations, and that includes XMP/EXPO.

Enable Resizable BAR

Important for older systems

By default, your CPU can only access 256MB of your GPU's video memory at a time. That limitation is a holdover from older PC architecture, and on modern hardware it creates a bottleneck that didn't need to exist. Resizable BAR, or ReBAR, removes that limitation entirely, allowing your CPU to access the full pool of VRAM at any given time.

The performance impact varies depending on the game and the GPU, but gains of several frames per second in modern titles are well documented, and some games benefit more than others. It's a free improvement that requires no hardware changes whatsoever, and it's really common to be disabled on older systems.

Along with ReBAR, you'll need to enable a separate setting called "Above 4G Decoding", which will allow your system to allocate more than 4GB of memory for your system to access in the first place. If this isn't enabled, ReBAR can't be enabled, and sometimes the ReBAR setting itself won't even show up without enabling it first.

One-click overclocking

It's worth a try

Most "one-click overclocking" features integrated into motherboards just waste power and don't give a meaningful performance uplift in return, but by default, your system is running with somewhat conservative defaults that protect against instability. There are a couple of settings worth trying that aren't motherboard gimmicks.

On AMD systems, the relevant feature is called Precision Boost Overdrive, or PBO. Enabling it allows the CPU to boost higher and hold those boost clocks longer, governed by the chip's own internal limits rather than an arbitrary board-level restriction. The equivalent setting on modern Intel processors is called Intel Turbo Boost, and specifically on their Core Ultra 200 series, "200S Boost" is a way to increase the speed of communication between components on the CPU itself. Both settings are a bit hit-or-miss when it comes to increasing tangible performance, but it's definitely worth a toggle.

Fix your boot settings

You're probably waiting too long for your system to boot

While boot settings don't affect benchmark scores or gaming performance, they have the potential to provide noticeable improvement to the overall experience of actually using your computer.

Fast Boot is a setting that skips some hardware checks in the booting process, allowing your system to go from a powered-down state to desktop in significantly less time. This helps, but there's another key setting on AMD systems that is almost life-changing.

Memory Context Restore is an AMD-specific feature that saves memory training data between boots, allowing your system to skip that step entirely and shaves several seconds off of boot times. In my case, my 64 GB kit of DDR5-6000 took forever to train with every boot, and enabling this feature quite literally cut my boot times by nearly a full minute.

The BIOS is worth your time

Four settings, maybe ten minutes of total work, and your PC is running meaningfully closer to what it was always capable of. The gap between a default BIOS and a properly configured one is bigger than most people expect, and the fact that it costs nothing to close that gap makes it one of the best investments of time you can make as a PC owner.