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Hidden Windows Installers Crippling Your PC's Performance?

2017-09-05
so the creation of this video was not planned I was actually in the middle of benchmarking the cryo rig h7 quad gloomy cooler the one that I have in the system right now along with the i9 70 900 X which is known to be a very power hungry CPU and also a CP that runs extremely hot but in the middle of my testing using I 264 I realized that my CPU which should have been idling was not actually doing that I had no other substantial background process running confirmed via the task manager except for one thing that popped up that I was unaware of at the time that was the Windows module installer this little guy right here is a nuisance not only because it does utilize some of your CPUs available horsepower but it does so without actually telling you and to be honest I wasn't too surprised by this Microsoft has been known to push updates without user consent in the middle of gaming in the middle of editing and rendering Microsoft might say hey we're gonna restart right now because we're Microsoft but that of course is a separate issue when I have an issue with here is the amount of CPU horsepower that the module installer was using while I was supposed to be at idle the I 970 900 X is an absolute but he myth of a 10 core 20 thread CPU it's a beast okay I reviewed it in this video right here I do have problems with though one of those does have hot it runs and that's why I was testing with this technically underpowered air cooler from crack I'm just kind of seeing what the worst-case scenario would be for the cooler that video is coming very soon what I had a problem with though this is a ten core twenty thread CPU okay overclocked to four gigahertz and still when the module installer was running when the computer should have been idling CPU utilization topped out at around 20 percent that's pretty substantial had this been a four core eight thread I seven which makes much more sense for the general consumer utilization would have been much higher that's a very bad thing especially when it's unplanned so I wanted to see just how much of an impact the module installer had I ran GTA 5 I didn't know how long I can do this because I wasn't sure how long the module install I would be running it's completely random as far as I'm aware and then also ran Geekbench and Cinebench while confirming that the module installer was still running via the task manager the game I tested was GTA 5 which offers a pretty fair balance between CPU and GPU horsepower with the module installer running average frame rate was 120 fps 1% lowers were 74 and 0.1% lows were 63 FPS by contrast when the module installer was not running average FPS was a hundred and thirty one one percent lows at eighty and point one percent lows at seventy two FPS from a comparison standpoint average framerate really didn't change this should be expected though it's a ten core CPU this is one of the best case scenarios for gaming in general even though a seventy seven hundred K is a better gaming CPU the extra cores on the ten core CPU allow us to do other things in the background without hindering much of that performance at all but where we really started to see the installer effect gaming performance was in the 1% and 0.1% lows a 6 FPS Delta for 1% lows I would say is fairly substantial I don't think it's insignificant this is almost a 10% reduction in the 1% lowest frame rates we observed 0.1% low is depict an even worse case scenario 63 FPS when the module installer was running vs. 72 when it was not we're looking at nearly a 15% 0.1% fps low reduction just from having that installer running and that can be substantial especially at these lower frame rates around 60 and 70 FPS we can also look at this graphically these are the frame times across the entire benchmark for both scenarios the blue dots here represent the install frame times and in this case you want lower frame tonnes right it's the inverse of FPS so the lower the frame time the higher the equivalent FPS it's exactly the inverse of frames per second by the way so a lower consistency here is what we're looking for and the free color the orange color here is slightly lower and you can see there our frame times are not as spiky there aren't as many spikes upward with the orange color as there are with the install blue color with a graph like that the flat of the line and the lower the line is to 0 the better off you are this is pretty substantial if you're a professional gamer especially I recommend checking the task manager beforehand to make sure that that module installer is not running when it came to CPU synthetics I tested Cinebench and Geekbench just to see what our actual drop was in potential CPU power with that task running in the background starting with Cinebench r15 single core score dropped to 118 from 171 multi-core from 20 to 17 to 1984 and with Geekbench for a single core score dropped by nearly 900 points in over 4,000 points the multi-core side so we're seeing our multi core performance dropping significantly whereas single core really isn't being impacted LMO it really depends on what cores being stressed and which cores are being utilized heavily by the Installer module so like I said this video was not planned it was not scripted I just came across this when I was benchmarking the CPU actually putting it through a few stress tests I wanted to see just how much heat the h7 quad Lumi can dump from something as hot as the I 970 900 X this is something that I don't think is too significant for most people most the time you won't notice the framerate drop and only a few times you'll have those dips that'll be pretty significant that you might say something else seems to be going on in the background here only reason I noticed this is because I had CPU Diagnostics open and running if you're not someone who looks at stuff like that a lot you probably won't even know what's going on and that's kind of what Microsoft wants they don't want you knowing that they're doing all this stuff to your PC in the background otherwise people would just keep turning it off and Microsoft would never be able to update anything still pretty salty about this one that I could imagine if I had an i3 i5 or Rison 3 CPU this utilization would be much higher and that would impact quite a bit especially if you're gaming you would notice my is this seemed more laggy all of a sudden if you notice that check your task manager first and foremost make sure that nothing is taking advantage of maybe more than 5% or so of your CPUs total utilization space unless you're streaming we're doing something that you know it's gonna take advantage of that extra horsepower I understand this is not a novel discovery it's not something no one's ever heard of before obviously Microsoft does this kind of stuff all the time but look I didn't know this was going on until I had i-264 up and running and if you're gaming you sure as heck I'm gonna know because you're gonna be preoccupied with the game not that I blame you if you like this video be sure to give this one a thumbs up thumbs down for the opposite be sure to click a subscribe button if you haven't already and stay tuned for more content like this especially the h7 quad looming review from crier rig with the NZXT software kind of mixed into there this is science to do thanks for learning with this you
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