Most PC gamers dive straight into a new build without ever touching their BIOS again, but that’s a mistake. Hidden inside your motherboard’s firmware are settings that can unlock more performance, improve stability, and deliver an overall smoother gaming experience. If you’ve never looked beyond the boot order, you’re probably leaving free gains on the table.

XMP and EXPO profiles

A must-have for gamers

When gamers put together their PCs or buy a prebuilt one from a system integrator, one of the settings that’s easiest to miss is XMP or EXPO. XMP (Extreme Memory Profile) and EXPO (Extended Profiles for Overclocking) are preset configurations that apply the rated speed, voltage, and timings to your RAM, and are from Intel and AMD respectively.

Memory bandwidth is super important for games, especially those that are CPU bound, so ensuring XMP/EXPO is enabled is an absolute must. For instance, running a kit of DDR5 6000MHz memory without XMP/EXPO means it’ll default to 4800 MHz. This can result in performance loss of up to 20% in some cases. These kits will ship with 2 or more profiles, and the settings stored in these profiles can differ vastly from kit to kit, but also from motherboard to motherboard. It really depends on the manufacturer of both, and how they handle XMP and EXPO.

Like with any kind of overclocking, there is a small risk of instability with XMP and EXPO, so if you’re running into issues, it may be worthwhile to try a different profile, or just simply turn it off, but in the vast majority of cases, turning XMP/EXPO on is essentially free performance for gamers.

Fan curves

An absolute necessity for all PCs

One often overlooked part of the BIOS configuration for gamers is fan curves, specifically for chassis fans and the CPU cooler. The default curves are often either too conservative or too aggressive. A conservative fan curve could result in inadequate heat dissipation, which could mean throttling during long sessions. A curve that is too aggressive will result in the fans ramping up too much during light use, which can get irritating.

Tweaking these default fan curves takes only a few minutes, and the benefits are definitely there. And while it may not be a BIOS setting, tuning your GPU fan curves in something like MSI Afterburner is highly recommended.

Resizable BAR

Should be on be default, but worth checking

While most modern motherboards should have this setting enabled out of the box, Resizable BAR, or ReBAR, is crucial to gaming performance, especially in titles where the VRAM buffer is under heavy load. At stock standard settings, your CPU can only access a small, 256 MB window of the GPU’s VRAM buffer at a time. This bottleneck was solved with ReBAR, which allows your CPU to see the GPU’s memory as one big chunk, which reduces overhead substantially.

This setting can be found in your BIOS, usually displayed prominently on the starting page for most. Depending on the game, you could see up to a 10% performance improvement, and some GPUs take better to the setting than others. For instance, Intel Arc GPUs essentially require it to be on, otherwise the card struggles mightly.

AMD Precision Boost Overdrive and Intel Multi-Core Enhancement

Your CPU has more to give

In terms of performance-enhancing settings, AMD Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) and Intel Multi-Core Enhancement are settings you need to be tinkering with, especially if you have adequate cooling to do so. PBO and MCE essentially allow your CPU to boost to higher clocks for longer, but they go about it slightly differently.

Multi-Core Enhancement forces all cores to run at the highest turbo frequency they can. This also increases heat and power draw, and will require a non-stock CPU cooler to handle the load. PBO is more of an umbrella of settings you can use to tweak the CPU further, allowing for boost overrides and per-core undervolting, if you’re into that. Intel’s MCE is more of a single, on/off toggle, which gives a predictable performance increase.

Secure Boot

A requirement for a lot of multiplayer games

Unfortunately, a lot of online multiplayer games these days struggle with maintaining fair play, and in an effort to close every door possible to cheaters, developers have begun to require users to enable Secure Boot in order to play their games.

Secure Boot is a firmware feature that blocks the loading of any kind of unsigned, untrusted drivers or bootloaders from being used on your hardware. It’s great for stopping different kinds of malware from embedding itself before Windows starts, and while it doesn’t stop cheating in games by any stretch, it does ensure that the kernel at least hasn’t been tampered with. Windows 11 requires Secure Boot, so it’s likely that you already have it on, but if you’re still on Windows 10 or another OS, it’s worth checking to make sure you have it enabled.

BIOS tweaks are a crucial step of a PC build

Tweaking your BIOS doesn’t mean diving into extreme overclocks or spending hours troubleshooting. It usually looks like a few simple toggles, a tweak of the fan curve, and you’ll be off and running with better performance. Before your next session, spend a few minutes making these tweaks, and you might be surprised at just how big of a difference it can make.