It is the most shared piece of advice in optimisation guides, and the only item on our list that can stop you getting into a game. The short answer fits on one line: you do not gain a single frame.
Disabling Secure Boot gives you no FPS at all. It is not a process running in the background: it uses no CPU and no memory while you play. It is a check performed at boot, before Windows even exists — and from the moment the machine has started, it is doing nothing that can be measured inside a game.
Inheritance. There was a time when Secure Boot genuinely got in the way: booting Linux alongside Windows, using unsigned drivers, certain overclocking and modding tools. None of that had anything to do with FPS — but "disable Secure Boot" made it onto the lists and was copied from guide to guide for years, long after the reasons had gone. Today the effect is the opposite of what is promised: it is what lets you into the games.
Access to games. FACEIT Anti-Cheat, Riot Vanguard (Valorant and League of Legends) and Ricochet (Call of Duty) require Secure Boot to be on — without it those games will not open, and the message you get rarely explains why. And you lose real protection: switched on, it stops code running at boot before Windows, which is exactly where the hardest malware to remove lives.
Ten seconds: Windows + R → msinfo32 → Enter. The first page shows "Secure Boot State" and "BIOS Mode". If the first says Off, it is disabled. If the second says Legacy, read the section after the table before you touch anything.
If BIOS Mode already says UEFI, this is one setting and a reboot. Enter the BIOS with the key shown, switch it on, and save.
| Motherboard | Key | Path to Secure Boot |
|---|---|---|
| MSI | Del | Settings → Security → Secure Boot |
| ASUS | Del or F2 | Boot → Secure Boot |
| Gigabyte | Del | Boot → Secure Boot |
| ASRock | F2 or Del | Security → Secure Boot |
Save with F10. If the option is greyed out, look for "Other OS" or "Windows UEFI mode" in the same menu first — some boards hide it until the OS mode is right.
In Legacy (BIOS) mode Secure Boot does not exist: it is not disabled, it cannot be enabled. Getting there means converting the boot disk from MBR to GPT and switching the firmware to UEFI, in that order. Done the other way round, the PC stops booting. It is the one item in our reports we openly call a candidate for a guided session — it is not hard, it is irreversible halfway through.
The same family of advice: "turn off core isolation". What you gain on modern processors is 0 to 3% — you cannot feel it — and what you lose is protection against attacks through vulnerable drivers, plus access to anti-cheat that require it. We are telling you the price on both sides: the recommendation is to keep it on, but it is a trade-off, not a mistake. If Windows refuses to enable it and points at an incompatible driver, that driver is the thing that is old.
The single biggest gain in a gaming PC is somewhere else, and almost nobody talks about it: the EXPO/XMP memory profile, which ships switched off and is worth 5 to 15%. After that come the slots your RAM sits in, the drivers, and whatever runs in the background. None of it requires disabling a single protection.
The free diagnostic reads the state of Secure Boot, Memory Integrity and a dozen other things — and tells you which are worth FPS and which are myth.