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BIOS tweaks

Firmware settings, including hidden ones your BIOS menu never shows, written via SCEWIN with no manual UEFI poking.

BIOS tweaks, including hidden settings your firmware menu never shows, written straight to firmware via SCEWIN with no manual UEFI poking. Pick your CPU vendor when prompted, toggle the rows you want, click Apply, and reboot. Writes only take effect after the next BIOS pass, and anything your motherboard doesn't expose stays greyed out.

Compatibility

Most systems are compatible with BIOS tweaks. If you built your own PC, you're almost certainly fine. The exceptions are laptops and prebuilt OEM PCs (Dell, HP, Lenovo), whose firmware is locked down by the OEM and hides most of these options. If a Setup Question isn't exposed by your firmware, the row stays greyed out and clicking Apply silently skips it.

Two motherboard brands need an extra step. ASUS and ASRock ship with runtime-variable protection turned on, which blocks SCEWIN from writing to firmware, but the fix differs by vendor. This applies to ASUS (Z790+, B760+, H770+ | X670+, B650+, A620+) and ASRock (Z590+, B560+, H510+ | B550, X670+, B650+, A620+) boards.

1. Both: in Device Manager (Win+R → devmgmt.msc), under Other devices, make sure every PCI Device is enabled.

2. ASUS: in BIOS, enable Publish HII Resources under the Tool menu, then go to Advanced → UEFI Variables Protection and set Password protection of Runtime Variables to Disabled. Save & Exit. It's a quick, non-destructive toggle, and that's all ASUS boards need.

3. ASRock: the same Password protection of Runtime Variables setting must be disabled, but ASRock hides it from the BIOS menu and there is no reliable way to turn it off in firmware. The only known route is modding the BIOS image and flashing it with a hardware programmer, which risks bricking the board and is strictly for advanced users at their own risk. On an affected ASRock board, treat the BIOS tweaks as unavailable and apply the equivalent settings from your board's normal, visible BIOS menu instead.

Before buying Elite for BIOS tweaks specifically: open the BIOS tab in the free version, let it initialize SCEWIN and detect your motherboard, and see how many rows light up vs. how many are greyed out. That's exactly what you'd be able to apply once you upgrade, with no surprises.
Using the Akros anti-cheat (FACEIT)? Writing BIOS settings needs a low-level driver, and while the Akros anti-cheat is loaded, it blocks that driver. If you're affected, the BIOS tab fails to initialize with a “couldn't load driver” error before you can toggle anything. Right-click the Akros / FACEIT anti-cheat icon in your system tray and choose Disable driver, then reopen the BIOS tab. Once your tweaks are applied, re-enable it before playing FACEIT again.

Before applying

Test the power-saving rows before keeping them. Disabling CPU and chipset power-saving features doesn't always raise performance. On a system with marginal cooling or existing instability it can make throttling or crashes worse. Apply, benchmark, and revert any that don't actually help.
These are real performance wins, not fine print. The virtualization rows (Intel VT-x / VT-d, AMD SVM / IOMMU) remove virtualization overhead and cut memory-access latency, and the security rows (Intel SGX, AMD memory encryption) free reserved RAM and skip per-access work. The trade-off is security plus the anti-cheat requirements below, so weigh each row on its own rather than assuming it isn't worth applying.

Kernel-level anti-cheat

Playing games with kernel-level anti-cheat? The virtualization rows can stop a game launching, kick you mid-match, or flag your account. Competitive Fortnite and FACEIT require IO virtualization (Intel VT-d, AMD IOMMU) left on, because it backs Kernel DMA Protection. Valorant (Vanguard) and FACEIT also require Memory Integrity (HVCI), which can't run without CPU virtualization (Intel VT-x, AMD SVM). On Intel the single “Disable virtualization” row turns off VT-x and VT-d together, so it hits both; on AMD the SVM and IOMMU rows are separate. The app flags each affected row with a red warning sign. If a game stops working after applying, re-enable the row and click Apply again.

The Windows-side half of this, HVCI, VBS and the CPU side-channel mitigations, is on the Mitigations page.

The tweaks, by CPU vendor

The catalog only shows tweaks for your detected CPU vendor (Intel or AMD). Both lists are collapsed below, so expand the one matching your CPU.

Intel BIOS tweaks

Intel power-saving features

  • Disable C-states keeps CPU cores out of deep idle so they're always ready for work, removing wake-up stalls when bursty work hits.
  • Disable PCIe clock gating stops the PCIe controller gating its clock during idle, removing wake-up cost on every device access.
  • Disable Energy Efficient P-state removes the BIOS hint that biases Windows toward lower-power P-states, so the CPU ramps up faster under load.
  • Disable ASPM turns off PCIe Active State Power Management. GPU, NVMe and NIC links stay permanently active instead of sleeping during idle.
  • Disable LTR turns off Latency Tolerance Reporting, the budget devices use to enable deep PCIe L1 sub-states. Leaving it off keeps links out of their slowest-to-wake sleep, the same path as ASPM.
  • Disable Race To Halt (RTH) turns off the strategy of finishing work as fast as possible just to enter idle quicker for power savings.
  • Disable OBFF turns off Optimized Buffer Flush/Fill. Devices stop deferring traffic and interrupts into power-aligned idle windows, so they're serviced promptly instead.

Intel performance

  • Disable spread spectrum stops the BIOS intentionally jittering BCLK and PCIe clocks to spread EMI, giving tighter clocks at the cost of slightly more interference.
  • Disable XHCI hand-off stops the BIOS owning USB controllers during boot so Windows takes them directly, avoiding the BIOS's slower USB stack.

Intel security

  • Disable Software Guard Extensions turns off Intel SGX, freeing the reserved RAM region. SGX is rarely used outside select DRM and security tools.

Intel virtualization

  • Disable virtualization turns off both VT-x and VT-d, removing virtualization overhead and lowering memory-access latency. Leave this on if you play Valorant or competitive Fortnite. Valorant's Vanguard needs VT-x (its required Memory Integrity/HVCI can't run without it) and competitive Fortnite requires VT-d enabled.

Intel miscellaneous

  • Enable PCI delay optimization tightens BIOS-side PCIe device-init delays for a slightly faster boot.
AMD BIOS tweaks

AMD power-saving features

  • Disable C-states keeps CPU cores out of deep idle so they're always ready for work, removing wake-up stalls when bursty work hits.
  • Disable chipset power-saving features turns off chipset-level power-state negotiations across PCIe and the SoC fabric.
  • Disable AB clock gating turns off clock gating on the SoC's Advanced Bus fabric, keeping internal data paths always-on.
  • Disable ECO mode turns off AMD's BIOS-level lower-TDP profile so the CPU runs at its full power budget.
  • Disable AMD Cool'n'Quiet turns off Cool'n'Quiet, AMD's CPU power-saving feature, so the CPU runs at a higher floor frequency.

AMD performance

  • Disable spread spectrum stops the BIOS intentionally jittering clocks to spread EMI, giving tighter clocks at the cost of slightly more interference.
  • Disable XHCI hand-off stops the BIOS owning USB controllers during boot so Windows takes them directly.

AMD security

  • Disable memory encryption turns off transparent memory encryption (TSME / SMEE), saving the encrypt and decrypt cycle on every RAM access.

AMD virtualization

  • Disable SVM turns off Secure Virtual Machine (AMD's VT-x equivalent), removing virtualization overhead and lowering memory-access latency. Leave this on if you play Valorant. Its Vanguard requires Memory Integrity (HVCI), which can't run without SVM.
  • Disable IOMMU turns off AMD's IO Memory Management Unit (the VT-d equivalent), removing IO virtualization overhead. Leave this on if you play competitive Fortnite, whose anti-cheat requires IOMMU enabled.

The Windows-side power settings these pair with, ASPM in the power plan, USB and NVMe idle, are on the Power tab.