The joys of PC gaming—where even a little bug or issue can throw a wrench in your gaming sessions, sending all your finely-tuned settings into a tailspin. Recently, AMD’s Ryzen processors have faced slow speed problems in PC games due to some peculiar bug in Windows 11.
The details came from Hardware Unboxed (via VideoCardz), a YouTube channel that knows a thing or two about PC hardware problems. In their latest review of the Ryzen 9700X, they noticed something odd: the gaming performance was lagging a few percentage points behind what AMD had stated based on their tests. That’s enough to raise an eyebrow (or two).
After a bit of detective work involving AMD and Hardware Unboxed——AMD threw a curious question: was the review conducted using an admin account? Not the basic account, mind you, but the ‘hidden’ system administrator account, which you have to enable manually in Windows 11 because it’s disabled in default settings.
Why is this relevant? The higher rights of this Windows admin account appear to be resulting in Ryzen chipsets surprisingly performing far quicker in the demanding titles. Thinking in this regard, that should be the reason why Hardware Unboxed and probably many others who didn’t enable this administrative account before testing seem to have struggled with speed. The result is a performance disparity that’s not only confusing but also frustrating for gamers.
The actual timing of this processing bug seems to occur during busy workloads—sudden spikes in processing demands, which are bread and butter for PC games. Hardware Unboxed did some reruns after activating the hidden admin account and, seriously, Cyberpunk 2077 had a good 7% faster at 1080p on an RTX 4090. So, the processor also matters a lot in gaming controlling the things alongside graphics card.
Interestingly, this secret admin account doesn’t just show benefits for the Ryzen 9000 series but also perks up the Ryzen 7000 processors. Their benchmarks showed the Ryzen 9700X generally outperformed its predecessor, the 7700X, with the enabled administrative privileges by some margin that was concluded after running 13 different PC games.
But what’s really going on here? Is it a bug, or is it something about the elevated privileges of the hidden admin account reducing overhead in gaming demands? The truth is, it’s a bit murky. Although AMD suggests it’s a Windows 11 issue, there’s no solid proof yet. We also don’t know how Team Green chipsets will perform in this scenario because Intel CPUs remain untested as of now. So, there are a lot of twists and turns about the exact problem.
What we do know is that if this is an issue from the Ryzen end, once Team Red fixes this bug, AMD CPUs are most likely to outperform their rival Intel chips very well. There is also a question mark regarding the situation on Windows 10 because we haven’t seen any result of processors’ testing on this operating system.
With all that said, you might also want to switch on this hidden admin account for an extra boost in your favorite games, let me throw in a word of caution: don’t. The account which is not enabled by default by Microsoft should have its concerns and logic. It’s actually not a local admin you can use in your normal routine but is typically reserved for troubleshooting and other niche scenarios. Using it as a daily driver exposes your system to heavy security risks, like malware or virus infections. So, even if you manage to get a few extra frames, it’s not worth it.