Hardware Unboxed noticed in its review of the Ryzen 9700X that, based on internal testing, gaming performance was a few per cent below AMD’s expectations.

After some back-and-forth between AMD and Hardware Unboxed, and a fair bit of head-scratching AMD asked if the reviewer was using an admin account.

 Specifically, the ‘hidden’ system administrator account that isn’t activated by default in Windows 11, not just the PC owner's local account.

This hidden admin account has elevated privileges, which seems to explain the speed boost to Ryzen chips in PC games. AMD used this account in its testing, while Hardware Unboxed (and likely many other reviewers) did not.

The performance drop-off outside of this hidden mode occurs in any ‘bursty’ workload – where demanding activity can suddenly spike – which is very much the case with gaming. This issue doesn’t affect applications with more prolonged and sustained workload.

AMD thinks a bug in Windows causes gaming sluggishness. Hardware Unboxed verified the issue by setting up the hidden admin account and rerunning tests on the Ryzen 9700X, comparing the results to those obtained with the local account.

Some games showed a significant difference, notably Cyberpunk 2077, which was seven per cent faster (at 1080p, with an RTX 4090 graphics card) with the hidden admin account active.

However, this issue affects not only Ryzen 9000 processors but also Ryzen 7000 chips. The last-gen CPUs benefit nearly as much from the hidden admin trick as the new Zen 5 silicon, though the Ryzen 9000 does show notably bigger gains in a few games.

Across a suite of 13 games tested, Hardware Unboxed found that the Ryzen 9700X was 3.8 per cent faster on average, whereas its predecessor, the Ryzen 7700X, was 2.6 per cent faster in hidden admin mode. So overall, the 9700X drops a few more frames on average outside of the hidden mode.