I have to mention that yes, it does give you a ton of performance, after testing with some of my friends, we saw a average performance improvement up to 89% depending on the game used in testing.
However you will be sacrificing some features. This has been a bit of a project that I started researching back in 2016, and still keep on doing it.
Please watch and try to do all of these tweaks in the video, once done, continue to the next part.
The first video in the Videos section at the bottom of this page.
Open Device manager, expand System devices, right click on High precision event timer and make it Disabled.
Open CMD (Command prompt) as Administrator and type in this.
powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61
Then search for Choose a power plan and select the Ultimate Performance Mode
Go to this link and download EmptyStandbyList.exe
https://wj32.org/wp/software/empty-standby-list/Next create a forlder on your C drive titled emptysandbylist-program and put EmptyStandbyList.exe in there.
Download my tasks XML file https://www.mediafire.com/file/25qwxga9u6qaoce/EmptyStandbyList.xml/file
Next open Task Scheduler and import task.
Find the XML file and select it. The task should now be imported and working.
Now open CMD again if closed and type in these two commands
bcdedit /set useplatformclock no
bcdedit /set useplatformtick yes
Open Control panel and open Keyboard and there set Repeat delay to Short and Repeat rate to Fast.
Then go Settings >> Ease of Access >> Interaction >> Keyboard. There you want to untick and turn off everything.
Open Control panel and open Mouse, then Pointer Options and untick Enhance pointer precision
Open Control panel and open Sound. There turn off (disable) unused audio devices. Do that for both the Playback and Recording tab.
Click on your primary audio device (output/Playback)
Click on your primary audio device (input) >> Communications >> Do nothing ticked
Control Panel >> Power Options >> Choose what power buttons do. Click on Change settings that are currently unavailable and then untick "Turn on fast startup" and "Hibernate".
Turn off hardware accleration in other apps
Turn off any "Keep running in the background after exit" setting
This can be managed under Settings >> Privacy >> Background apps
Privacy >> Camera >> Untick every Microsoft store app
System
Search for Game mode and Turn it on, next turn off Xbox game bar and Captures
Search for msconfig and run it as administrator.
Under Boot click on advanced options and tick Number of processors, then set it to max
Then tick No GUI Boot
Navigate to here Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile
And set SystemResponsiveness to 1
Next navigate to here Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\Tasks\Games
And set SFIO Priority to High
And set Scheduling Category to High
And set Priority to 6
And set GPU Priority to 8
Go to Settigns Update & Security, then Windows Update and go to Advanced options. There untick everything.
Next go to Network and Internet, under ethernet or wifi click on Properties and turn on Set as metered connection.
Look at your HDDs RPM and MAKE SURE it is 7200 RPM or more, no less than 7200 RMP. And that the cache size is large. Something like 256MB is top tier, so look for those. Also make sure that the interface is SATA 6 Gb/s.
You could get away with using a 5400 RPM drive, but bare in mind that the performance may not be as great.
For example I picked up one WD Blue (EZBX) 2TB with these specs
I might have 2 of these in my system in the future, who knows. Or a 4TB one, I do not know as of yet.
Open Device Manager
Expand the Disk drives menu.
Right-click on the drive you want to change.
Click on Properties.
Select the Policies tab at the top of the new window.
Mark the checkbox next to Enable write caching on the device.
Disable pagefile on HDD
Advanced system settings >> Advanced >> Performance >> Settings
And in there the Advanced tab >> Virtual memory >> Change...
Select the drive with the pagefile and tick No paging file, then click Set and OK
Enable File Indexing if not Enabled
In file explorer rightclick on the HDD and select properties
Then tick on Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties
Defragment and Optimize Drives
In windows search for Defragment and Optimize Drives
One important note, do not, DO NOT defragment your SSD, it will damage it.
In Scheduled optimization click on Change settings
In there Tick Run on a schedule and set it to Weekly
Then tick Increase task priority
And in Drives click Choose and pick ONLY YOUR HDD or HDDS not SSDs it will damage those.
In Task Scheduler on the left side expand Task Scheduler Library, then Microsoft, then Windows and select Application Experience
There disable or just delete Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser and ProgramDataUpdater.
One additional note. If you want to improve performance and lifespan of your SSD, you can move your Downloads, Documents and such to a seperate older drive. I reused my older 1TB Seagate Bbaracuda 2.5' drive just for that.
Here are the specs for the older drive
Seagate Bbaracuda 2.5' - 1TB
Wipe the etire drive and make folders for for Downloads and other folders. Next Open File explorer, right click Downloads for example and select Properties.
Next go to the location tab and select the folder we just created on that drive. Then hit OK and do the same for Videos and so on.
Also do error checking on the regular, sometimes Windows will give you the option to fix problematick parts and therefore keeping a reasonable ammount of performance.
And another thing a 3.5' HDD is much faster than a 2.5' HDD. The most important metric of a HDDs performance is its average read and write speed and the longer it can stay at those average speeds, the better overall. Since you won't see a max speed increase but a average transfer speed increase either small or large it is still better than nothing.
My average transfer speed went from 250MB/s to 350MB/s. With a burst rate of 307MB/s.
So my suggestion is to use a 2.5' for Documents and generaly no so frequented data and a much faster 3.5' HDD for game storage. It should be obvious, that putting your OS on an SSD will make your HDD faster, since it does not have to deal with as many random read and write operations.
Enable your motherboards Performance enhancement mode for aout cpu overclocking, it is safe, but will use more power and will require better cooling.
Also try overclocking your RAM by using a XMP profile. (In my case it went from 2133MHz to 2666MHz)
Then there is GPU overclocking. I am not going to explain, instead I will recommend you to learn about it on youor own.
Go to device manager and look for Universal Serial Bus controllers and go into each and every one by clicking Properties the go to the Power Managment tab and untick "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" then click OK.
These videos detail ALL the steps I took to maximize performance on my windows workstation.
Get the most out of your Windows 10 install!More comming soon...