What settings does the Power Slider actually affect?

In Windows Vista, 7 and 8, you manage your power/performance options via “Power Options” in Control Panel, and by-default have three plans:

Power Saver

Balanced

High Performance

In Windows 10, by-default (i.e. on a clean install), recent versions only come with “Balanced” and offer a slider to adjust the power/performance:

Does anyone know though when you drag the slider left or right what settings actually get set/affected by doing so?

Ideally I’d like a table that shows for each position what is altered, but Googling-around I can only find vague summaries for each notch.

(I’m also aware you can still create custom Power Plans in Windows 10 and still use those, if you wish, but I’d imagine this slider may cover some additional settings, especially related to UWP apps, that the Advanced settings for old-style plans don’t).

Thanks

Conversation 2 comments

  • darkgrayknight

    Premium Member
    28 May, 2020 - 2:02 pm

    <p>This would be very interesting to know: Does this slider actually change other, unreachable settings for UWP apps or other Win8/10 only settings that the old custom power plans did not adjust?</p>

  • Usman

    Premium Member
    28 May, 2020 - 3:50 pm

    <p>It affects things like fan speed, video playback priority, brightness modulation (you could be on high brightness, but it will dim some part of the screen that's dark), amount of power the GPU and CPU can use and thus, how high they can clock.</p><p><br></p><p>My favourite thing is that on some laptops, if you have it set to best performance, logitech gaming mice will start randomly cutting out. If you set it to 'better performance' then the mice will be stable.</p>

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