What Settings/Tweaks Do You Recommend For Gaming?

[RetroComputing]

So far I have done the following to my new PC to get the best performance from it when playing games etc:

• Installed all Windows Updates
• Installed BullGuard AntiVirus (as it has a game mode)
• Set the Windows power management settings to Performance
• Made sure I have only installed software that I need and intend to use (Office 2016)

What other settings, tweaks or modifications do you recommend to get the best out of my new PC I use for gaming?

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My Specs:

Case
COOLERMASTER SILENCIO 452 QUIET MID TOWER CASE
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i5 Six Core Processor i5-9400F (2.9GHz) 9MB Cache
Motherboard
ASUS® TUF B360M-PLUS GAMING: Micro-ATX, LGA1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs - RGB Ready
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2400MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
6GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1660 Ti - DVI, HDMI, 3 x DP - GeForce GTX VR Ready!
1st Storage Drive
2TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 64MB CACHE
Intel Optane Memory
32GB INTEL® OPTANE MEMORY - USE WITH MECHANICAL HDD
Power Supply
CORSAIR 550W TXm SERIES™ SEMI-MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Processor Cooling
STANDARD CPU COOLER
Thermal Paste
COOLER MASTER MASTERGEL MAKER THERMAL COMPOUND
Sound Card
Creative Sound Blaster Zx 5.1 PCI-E Soundcard
Wireless/Wired Networking
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)
USB/Thunderbolt Options
2 PORT (2 x TYPE A) USB 3.0 PCI-E CARD + STANDARD USB PORTS

 

[Oussebon]

What other settings, tweaks or modifications do you recommend to get the best out of my new PC I use for gaming?

As few as possible.

The deeper into google you go, the more you will see weird and wonderful things people do to try to improve performance (it usually involves trying to do things to CPU cores, and I don't mean overclocking).

But the real answer is that fiddling with things for the sake of it, especially without a specific agenda, is more likely to mess things up.

Keep the system clean on the insides i.e. dust the fans and heatsinks.

Don't fill the storage up to the brim.

You can potentially adjust GPU fan profiles to help improve the boost frequencies it sustains. But only if the performance isn't adequate. If you're gaming on a 60hz monitor and are getting 60+ fps there's no point. Or if you get less than 60fps but it's CPU/engine limited, there's no point.

 

[RetroComputing]

fiddling with things for the sake of it, especially without a specific agenda, is more likely to mess things up

Absolutely! That's why I posed the question to see if there are some things I might have missed of my list of things I have done so far.

 

[SlimCini]

Absolutely! That's why I posed the question to see if there are some things I might have missed of my list of things I have done so far.

I'm not convinced many of those on your original list will have any impact on games anyway.

 

[ubuysa]

Even though you have Optane in your system, the best 'tweak' you can do is to ensure that you manage that HDD properly. Those I/Os that go direct to the drive need to be as fast as you can make them, so don't overfill the drive (start to worry when it's about 70% full), run garbage collection fairly regularly (either Windows Disk Cleanup of something like Ccleaner), and defrag the drive every so often. It's true that most of your regular I/O's should be resolved from Optane, but that's no reason to ignore the drive itself.

Poor hard drive performance is the number one cause of system slowdowns. Managing your hard drive is not seen as 'techie', nor cleaver, nor impressive - but that's where the performance problems are.

Oh, and never run any 'Windows tune-up' tools and never run a registry cleaner.

 

[RetroComputing]

Even though you have Optane in your system, the best 'tweak' you can do is to ensure that you manage that HDD properly. Those I/Os that go direct to the drive need to be as fast as you can make them, so don't overfill the drive (start to worry when it's about 70% full), run garbage collection fairly regularly (either Windows Disk Cleanup of something like Ccleaner), and defrag the drive every so often. It's true that most of your regular I/O's should be resolved from Optane, but that's no reason to ignore the drive itself.

Poor hard drive performance is the number one cause of system slowdowns. Managing your hard drive is not seen as 'techie', nor cleaver, nor impressive - but that's where the performance problems are.

Oh, and never run any 'Windows tune-up' tools and never run a registry cleaner.

I'm not saving any 'data' on the hard disk (I have 2 mirrored 8TB WD Red drives for that) so unless I but several hundred games from the Steam Sale I should be OK!

Does hard disk performance affect a game? I dont mean the initial loading of the game, but for example I have Far Cry New Dawn which I'm playing at the moment, if I was to swap out my 2TB hard disk for a 512GB Kingston SSD am I going to see better in-game performance?

 

[ubuysa]

Does hard disk performance affect a game? I dont mean the initial loading of the game, but for example I have Far Cry New Dawn which I'm playing at the moment, if I was to swap out my 2TB hard disk for a 512GB Kingston SSD am I going to see better in-game performance?

It all depends on how often the game reads/writes to the HDD.

Whenever you write to a file you run the risk of the file management system deleting the old copy and creating a new (and larger) copy somewhere else on disk. Over time this leads to longer seek times on read and (even worse) can lead to file fragmentation, which makes for very long seek times on read.

If the game just reads from the HDD and rarely writes then the Optane memory should cache those reads meaning you never go to the spinning disk.

 

[Oussebon]

if I was to swap out my 2TB hard disk for a 512GB Kingston SSD am I going to see better in-game performance?

You shouldn't expect a higher framerate.

It may help avoid stutters if there is something taxing your HDD while gaming or if the specific games are open world and happen to be prone to giving stutter when loading new cells.