I was encrypting a hard drive with VeraCrypt using AES, about 1 TB, which takes a few hours. My computer has an Intel i5 6500 with AES-NI (hardware accelerated AES). I noticed the CPU frequency went down from 3.2 GHz (base clock) to around 0.9 GHz, as is usual with power saving features these days, and the task manager shows idle usage at 5-15%.
Is the speed of the encryption in any way dependent on the CPU frequency, i.e. could I speed up this process by switching the power saving mode in my operating system (Windows) to "maximum performance"?