Gadgetory

when we received the new 10 series laptops for review we noticed that they were anything but instant at least these MSI units we got and that's because when we open the system tray we're fronted with this monstrosity on the screen now even with an SSD opening Windows Explorer took one full second minimally and Norton is there about three different control panels are there because you need different interfaces to get to the same place and all manner of other bloatware today we're showing you just how profoundly a systems FPS is dragged down by bloatware extra software you don't want but before we get into that this coverage is brought to you by iBUYPOWER and a new element gaming PC with a full tempered glass side window LED lights and the fans and under glow and is basically a modified s340 these are two systems we're using to demonstrate the problem one is an msi ge62 VR Apache Pro this is a brand new system from the factory and clearly demonstrates that the sluggish input is not a hardware issue the ge62 VR has a gtx 1060 fold desktop GPU installed an i7 6700 HQ cpu that boosts to 3.5 gigahertz 256 gigabyte m2 SSD 16 gigabytes of ddr4 and cost $1,700 so clearly it should not be a hardware problem it should not be slow out of the box the other system is from last generation and uses a 970m mobile GPU with an i7 CPU and is also an MSI GECs laptop the software pre-installed and launching on boot includes Norton AntiVirus killer networking steelseries keyboard management touch pad management warranty registration popups that are incessant MSI control panel Intel software another MSI software solution Microsoft onedrive and a couple of other things Norton is the biggest offender in terms of active processor utilization just during file transfers alone moving games for example from our internal server to the laptop we saw CPU utilization spiked to 100% at times CPU usage often hit 30% sporadically during use just normal use often when Norton decided to scan something and this is an important topic although a lot of viewers of this channel are enthusiasts of some kind you likely have a good idea how to optimize one of these things out of the box ie uninstall everything not everyone who's buying these laptops will know that and they might see it as the brand is bad the hardware is bad Windows is bad something like that when in reality it's just filled with trash from the get-go let's look at the impact of this messy OS on gaming performance full test methodology and the article can be found in the link in the description below make sure you click that three more on this issue the hypothesis here is that more CPU bound games will exhibit a bigger performance swing as the bloatware is taxing the CPU sporadically during up time starting us off the ge62 VR with a gtx 1060 pushes these numbers for GTA 5 at 1080p with our very high and ultra settings configured without bloat where we're running 109 FPS average 78 1% lows and 70 0.1% lows the article by the way explains these numbers if you don't know what they mean but the short of it is that they are the slowest groupings of frames rather than minimum measured by looking at frame times with bloatware those numbers fall 290 FPS average or in the 50s for 0.1% low FPS just for the average alone that's a change of 20.7% by disabling all the pre-installed software that comes with the laptop and uninstalling norton for a higher resolution play that's a game-changer because it could be the difference between 60 FPS Plus or not and the lows are hugely important too because we will start seeing visible stuttering with other games and let's just take a look at one of those now here's Metro last light a CPU intensive game at 1080p with very high quality and high tessellation the GTX 1060 rig runs at 75 points 7 FPS average without bloatware 54.7 FBS 1% low and 51 FPS 0.1% low is good numbers across the board with a system running its factory default including the software we're seeing a 59 FPS average and less than half the 0.1% low values this is a huge hit to performance and will present itself as staggered FPS output in gameplay there's a major disparity to in frame time pacing and more suitably this also means that the low metrics would be totally incompatible with fluid vr play without dynamic quality adjustments in the face of MSI's VR badge on the system looking at the 970m unit last generation we're seen an output of 40.7 FPS average with 30 FPS 1% lows and 24 0.1% lows with no bloatware at all looking at its performance from the factory again with all of the software those numbers are almost halved across the board there's nearly a 2x gain and performance just by removing clutter and that's particularly noticeable with the lows 13.7 FPS 0.1% metrics means visible stutter and choppin framerate output which creates a jarring experience here's shadow of mordor on the 970m unit at 1080p with ultra graphics we're seeing a marginal improvement from 44 FPS 240 9.3 FPS average or approximately 12% and that is again caused by the software pre-installed overwatch is the only game we tested where no serious improvement was shown and that's a result of the game being minimally demanding for this type of hardware and it's also bumping into GPU limits before CPU limits the ge62 VR 1060 unit is producing a frame rate of 1 47.7 FPS average with both the clean and bloated systems but we see a market improvement in the 0.1% and 1% low metrics with the cleaned out unit the same is true for the 970m where performance is most different at the low values this coincides with our findings that the CPU chokes almost randomly on norton and other background processes the takeaway here is not that these systems are bad the hardware is actually pretty good when we look especially the 1060 s performance with no software installed or active and it's really just unfortunate for MSI because out of box the unit to a consumer will look worse than it's actually capable of performing if you uninstall or disable a lot of the stuff that's unnecessary it doesn't have to be all of it you can leave this steelseries keyboard stuff like that but Norton in particular get rid of that the MSI control panel is certainly not needed you get rid of that this system will perform anywhere from 12% at the low end to 20 plus % better in framerate with the exception being games like overwatch which are more bound by GPU and stuff like that instead and even in those instances you see improvement in the low metrics which will do stutter because the CPU is just randomly spiking to 30% plus load for the bloatware applications not for the actual game itself so if MSI would kind of move away from this it will improve two things one is the user experience out of box which of course we think is the most important and two from maybe MSI's business perspective it will improve the benchmark numbers when reviewers look at these units and from a competitive standpoint that's something they should care about even though it's maybe not something that consumers care about a lot it is a driving argument for making a business decision to potentially acts some of the software that's pre-installed one thing we talk about with system integrators like cyber power origin and iBUYPOWER is that they all have options to ship the unit with no bloatware at all this is the correct approach and should be adopted by MSI and besides MSI units are often sold as rebranded SI units anyway if you were to buy one of these from MSI and then the same unit again from an SI who opt out of bloatware you actually see better performance out of box with the SI unit and MSI is not the only offender either gigabyte ships their laptops the new tens laptops with xsplit pre-installed and their own control panel software which they call smart dashboard and then there's the ACE use laptops which include a sonic sound suite that's for sound control also unnecessary and xsplit and ROG Control Center or whatever they call these days ROG gaming's and I believe is what they call it now another useless control panel that controls all the same things you can do through windows or better applications that are less load intensive on the CPU for no reason whatsoever so these are not issues that are strictly relegated to these MSI units and I guess the takeaway here is when you buy a laptop this isn't obviously something you can just DIY like a desktop when you go buy a laptop go through the software that's on it and get rid of it if you can do without that software obviously some things you would want to keep like the touchpad management pretty important those things that you can't really do just from windows sometimes anyway you can keep the SteelSeries stuff for the RGB keyboard but Norton if you get rid of it I I'm sorry Norton I like your product if you get rid of it do so the control panels like the ROG one the MSI one the gigabyte they all have a control panel get rid of that and of course there's other things like onedrive if you're not going to use it just dump it if you're going to use it whatever no big deal so that's kind of the takeaway the only thing here we haven't really discussed is that some of this may not be quite as easy to resolve for the manufacturers as just removing whatever the software is because they likely have partnerships in place there's a good chance that there's some kind of financial partnership between Norton and MSI one of them if not getting money they're definitely doing some kind of exposure trade so partnerships are things were obviously not including here that could impact what shows up this year versus maybe next year if they make changes based on testing but that's kind of the only one outlier that we can't really look at too closely so that is it for this video patreon link in the post roll video if you want to help us out directly with this type of research as always subscribe for more content comment below I'll see you all next time you