Windows' hidden Admin Account significantly boosts the performance of the AMD Ryzen 9000 Series

It seems that Windows’ hidden Admin Account might be the secret sauce to boosting the performance of AMD’s latest Ryzen 9000 and 7000 series CPUs.

AMD, known for its fierce competition with Intel, especially in the CPU arena, recently launched its Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series. These chips were already turning heads with a 16% IPC boost announced at Computex 2024. But despite this, comparisons with the previous Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 series left some feeling underwhelmed, pointing towards a need for better optimization, particularly on Windows.

The plot thickened when comparative tests between Windows 11 24H2 and Linux suggested that the latter outperformed in gaming and other workloads. This hinted at a potential issue with Windows slowing down AMD’s chips.

AMD and YouTube’s Hardware Unboxed found that a bug related to Account privileges in Windows was indeed impacting the performance of the Ryzen 9000 series desktop CPUs. By switching to the Administrator Account, the Ryzen 7 9700X saw a performance jump of close to 4% in average frame rates and just over 3.5% in percentile lows.

For those curious, accessing this hidden Administrator Account is as easy as executing a simple command:

net user administrator /active:yes.

Interestingly, this performance boost wasn’t exclusive to the Zen 5 chips; the Zen 4-based 7700X also saw improvements, suggesting a broader issue affecting the entire Socket AM5 lineup. AMD even hinted that incorrect driver provisioning on Windows could contribute to the problem, advising reviewers to clean up Windows or reinstall the chipset driver when swapping CPUs.

If you’re using an AMD Ryzen 9000 or 7000 series CPU and are not getting the performance you expected, this little trick might be worth a try.