How to enable the Ultimate Power Plan on Windows 10 Pro or Home

Microsoft announced in February of 2018 that the upcoming Windows 10 Pro for Workstations version would get a unique power scheme called Ultimate Performance.

Windows 10 Pro for Workstations is a special version of Windows 10 designed specifically for high-end tasks and applications that require lots of RAM and processors.

To distinguish Windows 10 Pro for Workstations from the consumer-orientated Windows 10 Pro, Microsoft revealed that Windows 10 Pro for Workstations would support features that Windows 10 Pro would not support.

The company mentioned expanded hardware support (more CPUs and RAM), support for creating volumes with the Resilient File System (ReFS), or persistent memory support. Microsoft failed to mention that Windows 10 Pro supported some of the features as well and that it limited ReFS support in Windows 10 Pro.

The Ultimate Performance power scheme

The Ultimate Performance power scheme is a new power plan that is only available in Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. Designed to reduce micro-latencies to boost performance, the power plan changes settings that Microsoft collected over time that "allow the OS to quickly tune the behavior based on user preference, policy, underlying hardware or workload".

The Ultimate Performance plan is not available on Windows 10 Pro or Home systems by default. It is possible, however, to integrate the plan in the system. How that is done depends on the version of Windows 10:

Windows 10 version 1709 or earlier

ou need to download the power plan to the local system as it can't be enabled directly on Windows 10 version 1709 (Fall Creators Update) and earlier versions of Windows 10.

You can download the plan from this web host.

Do the following once you have downloaded the new power plan:

1. Extract the archive to the local system.
2. Open a command prompt interface.
3. Navigate to the directory you extracted the plan to, e.g. cd c:\users\martin\downloads\ultimateplan
4. Run the following command to add the new power plan to the list of available schemes: powercfg -import c:\users\martin\downloads\ultimateplan\UltimatePla n.pow
- Note: you may need to adjust the path accordingly as your username is probably not martin and if you placed the plan in a different directory.
5. You should get the "Imported Power Scheme Successfully" message right away.

Open the Power Options on the device. You can do so by tapping on the Windows-key, typing Power Options, and selecting the Control Panel result from the list of results.

You find the new plan after selecting "show additional plans". Select it to activate it on the device.

The method is easier if you run Windows 10 version 1803 or later. All you have to do then is the following:

1. Tap on the Windows-key to open the Start Menu.
2. Type Cmd.
3. Hold down the Shift-key and Ctrl-key, and select Cmd.exe from the list of results.
4. Select yes when the UAC prompt is displayed.
5. Run the command powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61.

You can delete the plan at any time by selecting "change plan settings" in the Power Options and then "Delete this plan".