Lots of Pain
from 06/11/2025, by uni — 5m read
Reorganizing all my belongings at home me made feel like I had something else to clean up: my computer. I knew I wanted to reinstall Windows after my last semester for a while now, but this was the tipping point. When I first built the first iteration of this computer, I had installed Windows 10 Pro. Windows 11 had came out that same month and I wasn't convinced to switch until I upgraded to a 12th gen Intel processor. This was solely so the new Window's scheduler could properly utilize the E-Cores of my chip. Otherwise, it was kind of a pain at the time to get the visuals of the system back to how I like it. Check out my Windows 11 install notes here.
To be honest, I like to think I keep my digital space fairly organized. I make an effort to keep media files off my boot NVMe drive, which I reserve for my OS and games. I regularly uninstall programs I no longer need, keep my downloads folder tidy, and try to stay on top of clutter. But just like in real life, things inevitably start to pile up. Over time, I ended up with a mountain of files I couldn't bring myself to delete for one reason or another. I knew I'd have to bite the bullet eventually and finally let them go.
One summer when I was doing an internship in Chicago, I installed my boot drive into my Thinkpad so I could have all my projects and configurations with me. For the most part things were pretty much plug and play, but Lenovo automatically installs some drivers that I tried my best to clean up after the fact. Plus, once coming back home I completely switched around the parts in my computer several times. Going from Intel to AMD, and upgrading my GPU. Though I was also diligent in keeping my drivers in check, who knows what could've remained in my system? The final thing that sounded an alarm for me was when I accidentally installed some Chinese virus (long story), and removed it with HitmanPro. This removed secured my system but looking through the Windows registry, there was still bits of pieces of changes made by the virus that still persisted.
Now, I'm writing this from a clean, freshly installed Windows 11 environment, and I'm glad I did it. I backed up game saves, configuration files, and some leftover media to a secondary NVMe drive, and started fresh. I still need to reinstall a few things like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere, but my main workflow is already reestablished. Everything feels faster, smoother, and just... clean. But is it actually faster?
I wasn't expecting any real performance improvements, my system was already well-tuned and I was happy with how it performed (see my 9800X3D upgrade notes). But I ran the CS2 benchmark again with identical in-game settings just to check, and to my surprise, there was a noticeable difference:
OLD INSTALL: 9800X3D Tuned + 6200 MHz CL28 RAM
[VProf] -- Performance report --
[VProf] Summary of 72606 frames and 115 1-second intervals.
[VProf] FPS: Avg=634.8, P1=250.3
NEW INSTALL: 9800X3D Tuned + 6200 MHz CL28 RAM
[VProf] -- Performance report --
[VProf] Summary of 81841 frames and 115 1-second intervals.
[VProf] FPS: Avg=715.4, P1=261.8
I also made a couple of minor RAM timing changes, specifically loosening a few values:
tRRDS from 4 → 8tFAW from 20 → 32 (since tFAW = tRRDS * 4)tWTRS = tRRDS / 2 = 4I used PYPrime 4B (bundled with BenchMate) to validate these tweaks:
Old Timings (tRRDS = 4, tFAW = 20):
New Timings (tRRDS = 8, tFAW = 32):
What's evident here is that my older (tighter) timings yielded slightly better average FPS, but the new (looser) timings significantly improved 1% lows. That tradeoff is worth it for me, I'm now using a 480Hz OLED as my main monitor, and keeping frame dips minimized is far more important than pushing out a few extra average frames. The smoother the lows, the better it feels in-game. Overall, I'm happy with the fresh install. I might keep tweaking timings again soon but honestly, it might just be a waste of time.