- The original AMD Ryzen Balanced power plan was primarily intended to disable core parking. Waking a parked core has a latency penalty that costs performance, especially in gaming.
- At the time this plan was conceived, the out-of-box "Balanced" plan that comes with Win10 (AKA "OEM Balanced") disabled core parking for Intel processors, but not AMD processors. Ergo, an artificial performance disadvantage was being applied to AMD processors.
- Beginning with Win10 RS4 (IIRC), the OEM Balanced plan also disabled core parking for AMD processors.
3a) At the time Win10 RS4 was released, you may have seen chatter about RS4 improving game performance on Ryzen. These people almost certainly had not installed the AMD chipset drivers with the plan, because the disabling of Core Parking in the OEM Balanced plan was giving them the performance uplift the Ryzen Balanced plan would have given them.
4) Now that Ryzen Balanced and OEM Balanced both disable Core Parking, the need for Ryzen Balanced is diminished. 99% of the time, these plans will offer equal performance.
4a)
However, the Ryzen Balanced plan still sets a minimum clockspeed of 90% on a core that is actively under load. This eliminates some small latency penalties that occur when ramping a CPU from low clock to high clock. This will give the Ryzen Balanced plan a small edge in select cases. It's a few percent, and I've only seen it measured in synthetic workloads.
5) In
all cases, Ryzen depends on core C-states (e.g. cc6 sleep) for power management rather than winding down the clockspeed. This is why Ryzen has a "high" p2 of approx. 2.2GHz. It's much more efficient just to sleep the core at an extremely low clockspeed and voltage, rather than running it awake at a low clock.
5a) The good news is that Balanced/Ryzen Balanced/High Performance all have approximately the same power consumption as a result of this decision.
5b) The bad news is that Windows cannot probe the clock (only a VID) when a core is in cc6, as a probe would wake the core and kill the power savings. So Task Manager and 3rd party utilities just report the last active clockspeed that was observed before the core went to sleep. So your core might jump right from 4GHz to sleep, and Windows will still report 4GHz on the core.
That's the complete story.
tl;dr: use balanced or ryzen balanced for Ryzen, 2nd Gen Ryzen, Threadripper, etc. It's fine.
