Windows' hidden Admin Account apparently boosting AMD Ryzen 9000/7000 performance

AMD recently released its Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors, which boasted an impressive 16% IPC (instructions per clock/cycle) boost during their Computex 2024 announcement. This was a great opportunity for AMD, given how rival Intel is currently struggling with CPU stability issues.

Unfortunately, AMD just could not capitalize on the situation, it seems, as most of the tech media community felt the performance uplift on Ryzen 9000 is not enough compared to Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 series CPUs. The one area where the new chips have impressed me is power efficiency, and it appears that most of the IPC gains have gone towards that.

However, that's not all there is to this. Recently, comparative performance testing between Windows 11 24H2 and Linux (Nobara) revealed that the latter generally came out on top much more often in gaming as well as other workloads, indicating that Windows needed more optimization.

It looks like our speculation was correct, that Windows in its current state is indeed slowing down AMD's Ryzen processors, at least some of them.

YouTube Hardware Unboxed (HWU) recently got in touch with AMD regarding Zen 5's performance, and the latter suggested that a Windows bug related to the Account privileges is what's causing performance loss on the Ryzen 9000 series desktop CPUs.

Upon re-testing via the Administrator Account, the Zen 5 part, Ryzen 7 9700X, gained close to 4% in terms of the average frame rates and just over 3.5% in terms of the percentile lows.

For those wondering, the Administrator Account on Windows is generally hidden but can be accessed by using the command:

net user administrator /active:yes

It has one of the highest privileges in the Windows environment, surpassed only by the SYSTEM Account.

Curiously, although AMD said that the problem is only Zen 5, it appears that the Zen 4-based 7700X also saw improved performance, thus suggesting that the bug could be affecting the entire Socket AM5 lineup. It will be interesting to see if the problem extends to Socket AM4 chips as well.

Speaking of sockets, AMD has also supposedly suggested that incorrect driver provisioning on Windows could also be playing a part in this. The company has apparently indicated that reviewers clean up Windows when changing CPUs or at least re-install the chipset driver.

Provisioning essentially means the automatic configuration of the PC so that the driver is appropriately deployed on a system.

Source: HWU (YouTube)