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Currently I don't have much need for virtualization.

Anecdotally, my friend's old computer had BSODs a few times a week, but after disabling VT-x the BSODs didn't appear anymore.

In general, will disabling VT-x will make the computer run faster/more stably?

4 Answers 4

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If you don't need it, disabling it via the BIOS is fine.

In terms of stability, having it enabled or disabled shouldn't hinder/benefit the stability/performance of a PC. If you're not using software that is making use of virtualization, it should not affect performance.

Are you sure your friend didn't make other changes in the BIOS in order to try and fix his problems? Maybe he had an unstable CPU or RAM overclock.

I've had virtualization both enabled and disabled and when I've run benchmarks and stress testing applications, I've never seen a performance drop or a stability issue.

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    I guess that the results change from system to system. Searching in the web, someone claims to have experienced issues, solved by upgrading the BIOS. If two BIOS versions change the results, a different system should change even more. I have BSOD or freezing issues on HP Folio 9480m, which persist after BIOS upgrade to 1.32. I still have to test what happens disabling VT-x.
    – Halberdier
    Sep 3, 2015 at 8:24
  • Edit on my previous one: after disabling VT-x, the issues reproduced all the same, which supports the thesis of Yass. Then VT-x should not be implied into any stability issue.
    – Halberdier
    Sep 7, 2015 at 11:33
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I know it's an old thread, but it's still on the top of Google results. So I'll throw my two cents.

I had a fx-6350 which was working fine, but right after I enabled virtualization windows themselves become unstable. I was getting freezes and bsods every couple of days, that said after disabling virtualization the issues persisted. I couldn't fix it no matter what I did, so I bought a new PC.

A Ryzen5-2600, it was working perfect. But one day I needed virtualization, so I enabled it. And here I am again, games freeze this time. Every time after it runs for 15~ minutes a game will freeze. Since the only thing I did recently was enabling virtualization, I disabled it. No more issues whatsoever.

I can't say with 100% certainty it's virtualization related problems, but it seems like it to me.

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I just passed through this experience with my i7 8700k.

Its overclocked a lot to 5GHz all cores AVX offset set to zero, DDR4 OC from 3 to 3.6GHz, lots of voltage tweaking.

The OC was very stable and then I need Virtualization, turned that thing on via BIOS, then boom, 10 to 15 min of gaming the PC freezes. I reboot, play again, same crash after some time. And I know when is CPU/RAM issue because it just freeze, GPU freeze gives you a random color at the screen when freezing (my GPU too is heavily OCed lol).

So, after a lot of tweaking my voltages I could never get back to my previous overclock. Remembered that I changed that Virtualization setting, turned it off, and BOOM, all things are perfect stable on the previous voltage settings.

It does something to the CPU, what I don't know, but surely makes it more vulnerable to crashing when heavily OCed.

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  • Don't blame instability in an overclocked system on anything but the overclocking. Nov 15, 2023 at 0:37
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I have Intel Pentium G2020 with 12 GB Ram which worked fine for years. But i guess after enabling virtualization in UEFI and using/not-using VirtualBox(Installed on Windows 10 Pro 1909) caused BSOD every day either when PC is idle(For around 15-20mins) or when doing some other resource intensive tasks(Like Opening Mulitple files in Adobe Acrobat, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and some other applications like Microsoft Teams, qbittorrent, Mozilla Firefox[With 300+ tabs but only some tabs loaded]).

It gives me Event ID: 41, Source: Kernel Power, Keywords: (70368744177664),(2) in event logs.

But just disabling virtualization in UEFI stopped my BSODs.

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    Experiences could be shared in the comment, but answers should have an empirical basement. If you do not have enough reputation score to comment, earn reputation score first. Thank you for your interest in SuperUser. Oct 17, 2020 at 6:59

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