Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “BLOAT is killing your FPS”.
Don’T lie you filled that nice squeaky, clean windows installed with garbage. Didn’T you? Oh i get it. You wan na chat with your friends and download games and edit videos, but did you ever stop to think that all those things could be killing your fps now? Of course, everyone knows that having programs open in the background consumes system resources. So it stands to reason that a lightweight windows install should perform better. But do you need to be concerned about that? If you have a modern system well in this article, sponsored by seasonic we’ll be finding out exactly what sort of effect all the junk you might have running in the background will have on your gaming performance and you should get rid of it and if getting rid Of it will even fix the problem in order to a b test anything you need to eliminate as many variables as possible that makes setting up our test here a little bit tricky, because here’s the thing even two identical model, cpus or gpus – can have marginally different Performance characteristics, so that means that every one of our benchmarks needs to be run on exactly the same hardware, not just the same spec hardware, down to even our seasonic prime tx1000 power supply. This puppy sick by the way modular interface, super quiet fan and 80 plus titanium efficiency. The only non-identical part is our boot drives. We’Ve got a pair of crucial 1 terabyte ssds. We’Re gon na have the full details of our bench and our affiliate links down below the hardware is not the story.
Today, though, where things get really interesting is in software, both of our drives were configured with a fresh install of windows. 10. Then we applied identical, update regimens. That is where the similarities end.
The clean build got only what was required for operation system drivers, steam uplay, epic games, launcher and nvidia’s gpu drivers plus chromium for a light-ish internet browsing experience, oh and 7-zip, because you need to unzip stuff. We then went a step further and installed win arrow tweaker. It’S a super cool little tool that bricks windows, ability to phone home, aka telemetry, as well as putting a stop to things that most people don’t need.
Like cortana windows, inc, workspace task view and the like. It also attempts to intercept windows updates before they are forced on the pc, like the windows, malicious software removal tool, a notorious resource hog. As for the dirty build it’s downright filthy, we’ve got multiple pieces of security software fighting for resources. Then we’ve got skype. Discord.
Spotify share x, logitech, gaming software course. Our iq steam ubisoft connect, epic games launcher it’s a lot of stuff, and the craziest part is that it’s not that crazy, and these are all things that a normal gamer could easily have running behind the scenes. To add a little bit of a dynamic load, we’re also throwing a 4k video on youtube running. In the background, because i heard zoomers are super into multitasking.
Let’S start, then, with idle loads as a baseline, that was a snappy boot up and task manager has us pulling a grand total of one percent, cpu of which point two? We are at zero percent, cpu usage, not too shabby. I don’t know if i’ve actually seen that before zero percent cpu, what’s up with our ram at and for memory, we’re sucking back a whopping 2.3 gigabytes, not much else to say other than damn that’s clean time to see the dirty boy by the way. Yes, we know we’re not using the gen 4m.2 slot. It’S a gen. 3 drive, it’s fine there. It is.
Oh, you know what it’s the coating on the screwdriver tip colin. Ah, that’s why i wasn’t able to short it before the store.com. Actually, it’s going to be wan hoodies before we have screwdrivers like that, available v2 baby got pockets for days.
That’S a dirty! Welcome all right, oh god! The microsoft store is still here, got some malwarebytes down. Here i mean to be clear when we said it was going to have bloat, we didn’t mean like bad bloat, having malwarebytes on your computer’s perfectly legit thing to do. Oh god, corsair device update what the hell is.
Glary utilities calling i just clicked all the boxes on nine night. You know all things considered, not that bad in terms of cpu usage anyway, only about two percent, but memory is an entirely different story. We were sucking back over five gigs of memory.
Now that’s more than double what we were doing with our clean machine now. The obvious answer to this is just to install more ram, but most people these days are running 16 gigs and buying more ram costs a lot more than closing some background programs. Okay, this is not staying at necessarily two, sometimes around three there.
It is it’s at three now, four: five wait. What do you mean? What is windows explorer doing? I don’t even have it open now. We’Ve reached the point in the video where i have to do a little taste test and see. Can i tell the difference between the clean drive and the dirty drive? I’M gon na go sanitize this i’ll be right back. Let’S try two different games and then i’ll i’ll try and tell the difference between them. So i think the thing that you would have the hardest time, knowing the difference between is like csgo or doom, because they’re already like 350 fps, why don’t we do hitman? I think there’s like a zero percent chance. Linus gets this without an fps counter. Oh okay, okay, all right uh! I will go away and then you either will or won’t switch it.
I guess yes, opening window. I have my guess. Okay, i say this is clean and the previous one was dirty. That is exactly wrong. I’M disappointed in myself, my family um, all my friends, my supporters, really let us down it’s the opposite of an acceptance, speech, a rejection speech. Here’S the thing, though, just because i can’t tell the difference by hand doesn’t mean that there is no difference, so we did our homework and ran both of our setups through a gauntlet of benchmarks, starting with synthetics in 3dmark time spy. We were within margin of error. I think it’s fair to call this a tie, but moving on to blender’s classroom render, we actually saw a significant gap with the render taking an additional 14 seconds on our dirty machine. That’S about three percent. We then saw a similar story for browser.
Bench’S javascript based speedometer 2.0, which netted a 4.25 reduction in performance on our dirty machine. The results, then tipped even further in our in-game tests with cs, go seeing our greatest difference with a 5 drop in fps. Now, to be clear, that is still not the kind of thing that you’re just going to be able to feel using the machine, especially when you’re pushing over 300 fps. But it is measurable. F1 was tighter only a two and a half percent drop and we saw a similar story with hitman 3 in both the dartmoor and dubai canned benchmarks. So across the board the loss was minimal but measurable, and there are two main takeaways here. One is that the more over spec your machine is the less likely you are to feel any kind of problem. If we’ve been running eight gigs of ram and a quad-core cpu, we might have seen very different results.
Maybe that’s a good experiment for another day. The second takeaway is that, even with an overspec machine, your background tasks are acting as a drag on your gaming performance. I mean we didn’t put this in the script because we didn’t know yet, but it’s funny to see about a three percent difference in performance with about three percent cpu usage at idle, so bottom line. You need to keep an eye on it.
About half of you today are running 16 gigs of ram or more, which is great today, but as your background programs get more resource intensive as they’re apt to do that might change, hopefully ddr5 with its faster speeds, not to mention greater capacities, is gon na bring Some respite we’ve actually got some content in the works around that so make sure you get subscribed, so you don’t miss it now. What i want to do is see if we can get some of that lost performance back. So, what’s the best one to run probably cs, go then right since that’s where we saw the greatest difference, yeah. Why not? Let’S start, let’s start closing shiz see you later onedrive see you later dropbox, oh god bye everything. So is it as simple as that and we get all of our cpu back? Oh no corsair still has services running in the background. Who else does we’re down to only one percent cpu usage, though okay? Well, we should be able to see that it’s time three, two one scroll lock here we go point of clarification. Our benchmarking was all run at 1440p for 10, 40.. 410.
40.. How close are we okay, so in our benches, dirty like fully dirty was 403 222. Now so we’ve picked up seven fps the clean build was 423., it looks like just closing stuff wasn’t enough and when arrow tweaker is actually contributing to a difference in our performance here yeah. What do we have still running? In the background? That’S pretty cool.
I mean. There’S still like anti-malware services sitting there drawing point four percent, sometimes corsair service is still running. In spite of the fact that i closed the actual tray application. You wan na just try force closing those things yeah we could try it dropbox service is still running.
Dropbox update, it’s still running everything search still running like a lot of this crap is still running okay, so we further trim the fat. Do you want to go check it again? Iq started again iq service for msi motherboard. I think wait. The lg hub updater started again, let’s see if we can pull another couple fps out of that. Let’S try it one more time, borrow 864.. We got nothing more, it’s even less yep. The good news is this benchmark is really consistent. So it tells us that our our difference between clean and dirty is real and also tells us.
I think, we’re pretty much done here rather than to thank seasonic seasonic power supplies, whether you got a clean rig or a dirty rig. They have got the power for you. They’Ve got everything from value power supplies all the way up to ones with insane 12-year freaking, warranties on them and all the performance that you could need. You can check them out at the link in the video description.
If you guys are looking for another video to watch, hey, maybe check out the does a faster ssd matter for gaming, video that we did a while back. We tried everything from a sata ssd to a top spec nvme ssd and did a blind test to find out if our gamers could tell the difference. .