How To Add Microsoft’s ‘Ultimate Performance’ Power Policy To Windows 10

In February, Microsoft introduced a new power policy to Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, called “Ultimate Performance”. Now, while this policy isn’t available in the regular versions of Windows 10 Pro or Home, it is possible to “import” it manually.

According to Microsoft’s Dona Sarkar and Brandon LeBlanc, the Ultimate Performance policy uses the High Performance policy as a base and is designed to “eliminate micro-latencies associated with fine grained power management techniques”.

This comes at the cost of “directly [impacting] hardware” and “[consuming] more power than the default balanced plan”.

If you’re happy to take these caveats onboard, gHacks’ Martin Brinkmann has not only made the Ultimate Performance policy available for download, but written up instructions on how to load it into Windows 10 Pro/Home and activate it.

Basically, it boils down to using the powercfg command line tool to import the file, which will make it available via the regular power policy interface. Depending on what version and build of Windows 10 you have, the process will be different.

Once active, I’d suggest running some benchmarks to see if it makes a difference — if any. As Microsoft states, it could be more demanding on hardware and if you don’t get much of a boost, it’s probably not worth the extra wear and tear.

Enable the Ultimate Power Plan on Windows 10 Pro or Home [gHacks]