Any motherboard’s BIOS is riddled with many settings a beginner might not understand. Everything from overclocking your system memory to controlling your SATA bandwidth can be done from the BIOS, so it’s important to understand what each setting does.

This article discusses SVM mode in BIOS, what it does, and how you can take advantage of the setting. 

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What is SVM Mode in BIOS?

SVM stands for Secure Virtual Machine. A virtualisation feature available in AMD processors allows for better hardware access when running a virtual machine. The feature is also labelled AMD-V in some motherboards, so check all virtualisation options carefully.

Virtual machines are isolated operating systems running on top of a host OS which acts as their own machine. Since the host OS already controls the hardware, virtual machines often suffer from performance issues as the hardware is only partially handed over to the guest OS by the host.

However, with virtualisation like SVM for AMD or Intel VT-x/Intel virtualisation for Intel processors, virtual machines can interface with the hardware more directly, meaning better performance. This is primarily the main benefit of enabling virtualisation options like this. 

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Does enabling SVM Mode impact performance?

Aside from giving a performance boost to any virtual machines you might be running, enabling virtualisation options in your BIOS doesn’t have any impact, if at all, on the host machine. 

Depending on the hardware, though, some users have reported facing performance issues when virtualisation is enabled in their BIOS. Hence unless you’re running a virtual machine on your computer, we don’t recommend enabling the feature. 

You can check out our detailed guide on how to enable virtualisation in Windows here

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