Power tweaks

Power tweaks for CPU, USB, storage and NVMe, plus the Adamx Tweaking Utility Power Plan. Each trades a little power draw for lower latency and steadier frame pacing, so turn them all on for a desktop and be more selective on a laptop you actually want battery life on.

On a laptop, leave this tab alone. Disabling power saving can make thermal throttling worse, cause instability, and hurt battery life. The same goes for the power rows on the NVIDIA, Radeon, and BIOS tabs. The power plan below is the one exception: it only tunes the plugged-in side, so it leaves battery life alone.

Power plan

• Apply Adamx Tweaking Utility Power Plan builds and activates the custom Adamx power plan, tuned for low latency and steadier frame pacing.
  Applies 15+ power-plan settings. Includes:

  • USB selective suspend
  • USB 3 Link Power Management
  • Processor energy performance preference policy
  • Allow Throttle States
  • Processor idle time check
  • Minimum processor state
  • Processor performance boost policy
  • Turn off hard disk after
  • Primary NVMe Idle Timeout
  • Secondary NVMe Idle Timeout
  • Primary NVMe Power State Transition Latency Tolerance
  • Secondary NVMe Power State Transition Latency Tolerance
  • AHCI Link Power Management - HIPM/DIPM
  • Link State Power Management (PCI Express ASPM)

Sleep still works. The plan stops Windows dropping off to sleep on its own while plugged in, but the standby states, hybrid sleep and the power button are all left alone. You can still sleep the machine yourself whenever you want.

On battery, nothing changes. Only the plugged-in side is tuned, so a laptop keeps its normal battery life and standby behaviour.

On Ryzen X3D chips the plan detects AMD's power management driver and applies itself in a way that leaves AMD's V-Cache core scheduling working.

Boot and CPU

• Disable Hibernation turns off hibernation and deletes hiberfil.sys, reclaiming several GB on the system drive. Fast Startup is built on hibernation, so turning this off also turns off Fast Startup (below).
• Disable Fast Startup fully shuts the system down instead of hibernating the kernel, fixing cross-boot driver and update issues. Fast Startup can't run without hibernation, so if you disabled Hibernation above it's already off. Use this one when you want to keep hibernation but still stop the fast-boot behavior.
• Disable Power Throttling stops Windows throttling CPU clocks on background apps. Improves responsiveness at the cost of slightly higher power use.
• Disable Deep IO Coalescing turns off disk I/O batching for lower latency, at slightly higher power draw.
• Disable Timer Coalescing prevents Windows grouping timer callbacks. Timers fire on schedule at the cost of more wakeups.
• Disable Dynamic Tick forces the kernel timer to fire at a fixed rate instead of skipping ticks during idle (the tickless power-saving behavior), and clears any legacy platform-clock or tick overrides. Trades battery life for more consistent timer resolution.

USB

• Disable USB Idle in D3 stops USB devices issuing idle requests in the D3 low-power state, keeping them ready instead of parking when idle.
• Disable USB Selective Suspend prevents selective suspend on USB devices. Fixes mice and keyboards that stutter or drop input after sitting idle.
• Disable USB Enhanced Power Management turns off enhanced power management on USB devices so the controller doesn't aggressively idle them.

Storage and NVMe

• Disable Storage Idle Power Management turns off idle power management on SATA and NVMe drives, eliminating first-access latency spikes when opening files.
• Disable NVMe Idle Power Mode forces the NVMe driver to keep drives at full power instead of dropping into its idle low-power state. Applies to all NVMe drives.
• Disable Storage Enhanced Power Management turns off enhanced power management on storage controllers so drives stay fully powered.

The firmware side of the same idea, C-states, ASPM and PCIe clock gating, are on the BIOS tab.