don't lie you filled that nice squeaky clean
Windows installed with garbage didn't you oh i get it you wanna 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 video
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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 wanna 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