XPS 8950, extremely slow

This new XPS 8950 has AMD Radeon RX 6400 installed. 30" Dell monitor connects to Display port of RX 6400. It comes with Dell official NVMe with BIOS 1.10. Please see system info that shows memory usage below. With VBS disabled, it is much faster than before, but still slower than 3-yr old XPS 8930. 

There is one more difference that I forgot mentioning:

3-yr old XPS 8930 runs on Windows 10 home;

Brand new XPS 8950 runs on Windows 11 pro. 

Just compared both computer opening Photoshop, 3-yr old XPS 8930 is still about 30% faster than this brand new XPS 8950. 

In a bench test or a stress test, if your P-Cores are only running at 2.1GHz, there is your problem. Now figuring out why they are running slow is another story. It could be a thermal throttle issue while under load, a defective CPU or some settings or combination of settings that is causing this to happen. You can try to revert back to BIOS 1.9 and see if that helps but I doubt that it will help and needlessly installing and reverting BIOS versions has risks involved with it. Hopefully @Tesla1856  and @RoHe  will have some better solutions than I do.

Interestingly, both "power saving" mode and "balanced" mode have exact the same CPU setting (maximum at 100%, minimum at 5%). But the speed difference is huge in these two modes. 

3-yr old XPS 8930 does not have "balanced" mode. It has two options: "Dell" mode and "power saving mode". "Dell" mode was selected in XPS 8930. 

BIOS has no problems. McAfee was uninstalled the first thing unboxed. Every junk software was disabled or uninstalled. 

Your last suggestion nailed the problem. The system was in "Power saving" mode in default. Changing the power mode to "balanced", the speed is much faster now. 

The brand new XPS 8950 finally runs faster than 3-yr old XPS 8930 now. 

So basically two things I did makes XPS 8950 faster, thanks to the help from this community:

1. Disable VBS. VBS slows down the computer dramatically even for office software. 

2. Change power mode to "balanced mode". 

Thanks again!

Yea! Glad we could help...

Now go and enjoy your speedy, new toy!!

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@RichSpring wrote:

1. McAfee was uninstalled the first thing unboxed. Every junk software was disabled or uninstalled. 

2. Your last suggestion nailed the problem. The system was in "Power saving" mode in default. Changing the power mode to "balanced", the speed is much faster now. 

3. Disable VBS. VBS slows down the computer dramatically even for office software. 

4. The brand new XPS 8950 finally runs faster than 3-yr old XPS 8930 now. 

Thanks again!

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1. Yeah, same here. The Microsoft stuff works just fine for me.

2. Interesting. However, I always use High-Performance. That sets both Minimum and Maximum Processor speeds to 100% (it is, after all ... a plugged-in Desktop). Even set that way, the Intel processor still SpeedSteps down and Turbo-Boosts up.

3. Yeah, I've heard that. I don't use it. I think they figure there are plenty of spare idle cores.

4. Excellent. Good work.