AMD Ryzen 7 9700X gains 4% gaming performance by switching to Windows’ hidden Administrator account
Using a hidden account with elevated privileges can result in higher performance. The issue was not isolated to Zen5.
AMD Ryzen 9000 performance did not positively surprise all reviewers. It turns out that the benchmarks provided by AMD were not mirrored in independent testing. While performance varies depending on system configuration and varies between software and games, there was clearly something wrong with some of the data.
HardwareUnboxed went back and forth to confirm that their data was accurate, even before the first Ryzen 9000 reviews were published. AMD did confirm to the media that their testing was accurate, although they expected higher performance gains, especially in gaming scenarios. After these reviews were published, further exchanges between HardwareUnboxed and AMD brought a strange problem to the surface.
Ryzen 9700X & 7700X, Source: HardwareUnboxed
It turns out that AMD gaming performance, particularly for Zen5-based SKUs, may be affected by system account privileges. Gaming performance may be lower if a user’s account has insufficient privileges, it is claimed, and surprisingly, this would also affect local administrator accounts. AMD has explained that the best gaming performance can be achieved with a hidden Administrator account with elevated privileges.
As shown by a new review by HWU, there is indeed a performance uplift once a new account is used, and the Ryzen 7 9700X appers to be more affected than 7700X SKU. At this moment, it is unclear if this issue is related to a bug in the Windows 11 system or if AMD simply did not test other scenarios. Also, this ‘bug’ is not said to impact productivity performance, only gaming.
On average, in 13 games measured with an RTX 4090 at 1080p resolution, HardwareUnboxed noticed a 3.8% increase for the Ryzen 9 9700X once a new account was used. In comparison, the Zen4-based Ryzen 7 7700X saw a 2.6% increase.
According to Andreas Schilling (HardwareLuxx) AMD also encouraged reviewers to install or reinstall chipset drivers to get correct provisioning when switching CPU. In fact, it would be ideal if reviewers would use a fresh installation of Windows:
Unfortunately, sometimes Windows does not apply the correct provisioning after the CPU installed has changed. You can try uninstalling then re-installing the AMD Chipset Driver as a workaround, but a fresh install of Windows is ideal. Please make sure to restart then wait for the system to idle so that the provisioning installation may complete.
For the review purposes we highly recommend performing a clean Windows installation to ensure the provisioning is applied correctly. It may save time to have a separate SSD/image for the 9950X/9900X, and 9700X/9600X, so you don’t have to reinstall windows every time you switch between a single CCD and dual CCD configuration while benchmarking. We recommend using Cyberpunk as a sanity check. Using a 4090 you should be getting ~210FPS with the 9950X and ~200 FPS with the 9900X.
— AMD
AMD has confirmed to HWU that this issue will be fixed with a future Windows update. There’s no timing for the potential patch.
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