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You can now find the “AMD Ryzen Balanced” power plan included in the latest (17.10) chipset drivers. This was available earlier in the month as a separate download, but I guess this bundling is AMD’s way of cementing the feature for general availability. The plan is supposed to improve performance but keep power usage in check compared to Windows’ vanilla options.
When AMD first released Ryzen, it recommended that users set Windows to the High Performance power plan in order squeeze every last drop of performance they could out of their processors. Early reviews bore this recommendation out, as specific games didn't perform quite as well under Microsoft's default Balanced plan as they did under High Performance. Unfortunately, while the High Performance plan curtails the aggressive core parking behavior causing the drop in performance, it could also lead to higher power consumption. AMD's new power plan tries to thread this needle by disabling core parking while retaining some of Microsoft's other power-saving tricks.
When AMD first released Ryzen, it recommended that users set Windows to the High Performance power plan in order squeeze every last drop of performance they could out of their processors. Early reviews bore this recommendation out, as specific games didn't perform quite as well under Microsoft's default Balanced plan as they did under High Performance. Unfortunately, while the High Performance plan curtails the aggressive core parking behavior causing the drop in performance, it could also lead to higher power consumption. AMD's new power plan tries to thread this needle by disabling core parking while retaining some of Microsoft's other power-saving tricks.
