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Category: Tech Tips
Tags: HardwareOptimizationPCPerformanceStorage
Entities: AMDMSI AfterburnerNvidiaRevo UninstallerWindows 10Windows 11
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I feel very Shakespearean right now. Oh, when will PC return to normal?
Fun fact, this was one of my more recent prints on the uh Bamboo Labs HD2 and I
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printed a pretty sick Lilith Lilith statue. Almost said Lilith bust, but that would have been very Never mind.
Anyway, moving on. That's not what this video is about.
This video is about going into 2026, and right now is a terrible time to try and to try and build a PC, I guess, just because of RAM and storage prices. Graphics cards are
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currently at MSRP, except for the 5090, but uh that's probably going to change considering Nvidia is rumored to be pulling back production by up to 40% going through 2026. I don't think that's that abnormal.
We've actually reported on Nvidia reducing production as things
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normalize in the market. That is to kind of be expected because they were supposedly ramping up as fast as they could through 2025 to try and meet demand.
And once they meet demand, if they keep doing that, they're going to have a surplus. So, this is just normal business.
But, I digress. Today, we're going to actually give you guys some tips and advice to make your PC faster,
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more responsive, and just last a little longer without costing you a single solitary penny or whatever the smallest currency is where you live. I guess technically our penny is kind of obsolete now, too.
But, wow, I'm on a tangent. Moving on.
Let's go ahead and talk about some important things. are going to start from very beginner, which
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some of you will be like, "Oh my gosh, Jay." But there's a lot of beginners watching, especially right now after Christmas time. There's probably a lot of new people to the space.
Either they got some hand-me-downs or they bought something new or they just ran out to try and get what they could before everything's completely lit on fire across the industry. So, first things
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first, let's go ahead and talk about startup items. If you've been running a PC for a while and it starts to feel slower and slower over time, guess what?
With the exception of overheating, your computer has not gotten slower over time. Your operating system's gotten heavier and heavier.
So, if you're on Windows 11, hit the Windows button and
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just type startup apps and it will bring you to a page that will show you everything that is going to load up automatically when you start Windows. And you can just toggle off the stuff that's not important.
Fun fact, almost all of it is not important because every program you install these days, whether they be game launchers or like Adobe or
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heck OBS, any of the Elgato apps, they all want to start when you start Windows. Every single one of those apps that are open are going to extend your startup time before all of those apps have been loaded into memory and it's going to start eating up your system memory.
And if you're finding yourself in a position where you don't feel like
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you have enough, the last thing you want is all of those apps loaded into memory. Now, if you're running Windows 10, it might be a little bit different than currently on Windows 11 where you just type startup.
But just do a quick search for Windows 10 startup apps and you can find the same way to disable those things that are not important. But you don't want to eaten up your memory and
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you don't want to extend your boot time into Windows because it's having to load 50 million different RGB apps and monitoring apps and overclocking utilities and game launchers. That's just going to slow down your system as a whole.
Now, this kind of brings us into our next utility, which I feel every system should have, and that's Revo
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Uninstaller. Not a sponsor.
It is completely freaking free. There is nothing behind a payw wall behind it that's important to you guys.
In fact, you can even uninstall different built-in features into Windows 11 that maybe you don't want anymore. Copilot
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and stuff like that. But Revo Uninstaller will also remove all traces of programs that you've uninstalled.
When you uninstall a program, most programs built for Windows want to leave a lot of registry files and other things in place so that if you ever reinstall the program, it kind of picks up where
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it left off. Now, that's different than just having user profiles cuz more often than not, these programs that have user profiles when you uninstall them will say, "Do you want to keep the user profile in case you install later?" You can say yes or no.
But they always leave traces of programs behind. And having a very cluttered registry can also lead to
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other quirks, other slowdowns, and other memory utilization in Windows that is just going to be completely counterintuitive if you're trying to extend the lifespan of your PC because it's already feeling slow or obsolete. So download Revo Uninstaller.
We have a great tutorial on how to use it. Every
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PC should have it. Every PC I have has it.
Even my kids PCs have it because I have to go and uninstall all the stupid add-ons and browser extensions and all this other crap that my kids say yes to anytime they download something. And it just makes it a lot easier to not have to go hunting for any of that stuff.
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Bonus content. Right now, I was recently removing a lot of stuff from this system right here, which has had a lot of different iterations of Windows installs and utilities put on there cuz it's one of our older test benches, which is now just used for like temperature and power testing these days.
I found a program or a company that
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actually removes everything when you say uninstall. Unfortunately, they also uninstalled themsel from the industry.
It was EVGA. Now, this one's probably a no-brainer for many of you, but a lot of people still don't know this.
If you just install your memory into your system and you do nothing else, your
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memory is running at its slowest JDEX speeds. So, it doesn't matter if you're running DDR4, if you're running DDR5.
If you do not go into BIOS and enable either your XMPP profile for Intelbased systems or Expo profiles for AM5 systems
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or DOCP profiles for AM4-based systems, then your RAM is not running at its advertised speed, which meant not only are you not getting the most out of your system, you also got the most expenditure for no return because you could have saved a lot of money by buying a base set of RAM rather than
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something you just weren't going to turn on anyway. Now, fun fact here.
Just because those speeds are listed to be either Expo, XMPP, or dual compatibility doesn't mean your system is going to automatically be able to run at those speeds. It is considered an overclock.
And it's an overclock specifically of
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the memory controller for your CPU. So, my best advice would be before you even go enabling XMP or Expo, go into your BIOS and just save whatever your current settings are as a user profile.
Basically, it gets you back to exactly where you started if you have to reset your BIOS or clear your CMOS. And if you have any custom fan profiles or anything
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built into your BIOS, those will all be lost if you do optimize defaults and use a reset. So save your profile, go into your BIOS, and then enable either XMPP or Expo.
It'll be the one that's most appropriate for your system. It's the one that will show up.
And then see if it works. If it does, great.
Run some
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stress tests, run some games. Just do your normal activities and see if you start getting weird blue screens or crashes.
Don't do anything important. Try not to be doing important work or something that you could lose if your system does a random restart or a blue screen and you don't have autosave or anything like that enabled for your your program or your work apps.
So do it when
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you're doing tasks that are not that important to you. If everything seems stable, then you're good to go.
If things seem to be unstable, then you can go into your RAM settings and then you can actually just slowly reduce the overall speed or the mega transfers of your RAM, maybe one click at a time until you find max stability. I wouldn't
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go playing with voltages or anything like that, especially if you're a beginner. But we've talked about this for the last 13 years and people still don't know that the RAM that is on the the box the the speed on the box is not the out ofthe-box speed.
It's technically an overclock. And it actually caused a lot of debates because
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Intel for the longest time and AMD as well considered it a void of warranty if you enabled your XMP or Expo profile. That's a little different today, but things have changed.
Now, going back into Windows, it's important that you have the right power profile set. Specifically, if you were running a dual
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CCD X3D CPU from AMD, that would be the 7950 X3D and the 9950 X3D or the 7900 X3D or the 9900 X 3D. Both of those are dual CCD CPUs that have a cache CCD and
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a frequency CCD. The cache CCD is what you want your games being loaded on, but the cache CCD always runs at a lower clock frequency than the clock or the frequency CCD.
And that's by design. There's there's nuances and architectural reasons why that has to be.
But if you go into Windows and you
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set maximum performance or high performance in the power profile, it will automatically override theuler will override the CCDuler from AMD's chipset and will put all tasks on the frequency CCD because that's what you said. you
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said go high performance. And now high performance in Windows's mind means whatever has the highest clock speeds, but we know when it comes to games and X3Ds, that's not the case.
So, it's important to leave that setting on balanced. Balanced will basically let the uh CCD or the X3D CCDuler built into
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the AMD chipset to do the work. So, make sure you're not going in there manually setting it to high performance because that's an old school way of thinking.
Schedulers are very different these days. is we have asynchronous CPUs now.
It's actually doing you a disservice if you're running a multiple CCD X3D CPU
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and putting it into high performance mode. I kind of wish the chipset could just override that or would like back in the day where you used to say AMD profiles and it would be a little bit more clear, but I tested it with my own system even prior to making this video cuz I'm running a 9950X3D at home.
If I
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say high performance, it puts my games on the frequency CCD and not the X3D CCD, which is counterintuitive to what you want. So, just leave it on balance.
Not only that, for most people running day-to-day systems, there's no reason to run it on high performance. What it's
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going to do is it's going to keep your your C states in a higher state so that your CPU is running at more more frequency at all times. It's not going to clock down nearly as much.
It's going to generate more heat. It's going to generate more power draw.
And you're really not going to see any benefit from that because when you load your games or your profiles anyway, when they need the
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CPU to clock up, they're going to do it. That's the whole point of seastates.
So when you kind of disable those seates and then just run everything full tilt, you're not gaining anything, but you're losing efficiency and you're making more heat for no reason whatsoever. Let's just say now you're trying to get as
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much out of your system and you're trying to just hold off as long as you can from going and buying a new GPU. Now, I'll say this.
I've gotten in trouble in the past by saying it's probably the best time to buy a GPU right now. I've said that in the past.
I think right now is not necessarily the best time because prices suck overall,
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but compared to what the 50 series and the AMD 99 or 9070 XTs and 9070s launched at, the prices are probably as low as they're going to get before they get worse again because of what I said at the start of this video about production being slowed down from both
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AMD and Nvidia because of demand being met. So, prices could start trending upward again.
So, I think it's important to put on some sort of price tracker or use PC part picker or something to see whether or not uh you're comfortable where prices currently are. They look
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they've come down and they've sort of plateaued again. But if you're looking to buy a new GPU and you just can't afford it, something like MSI After Burner or any sort of third-party GPU overclock utility can get you a lot more performance without you having to do anything that requires any sort of
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knowledge or thinking regarding overclocking. Easiest thing to do usually would just be max out your your power limit.
Now, that's very much true for Nvidia graphics cards. AMD, now we're talking about undervolting and weird things.
AMD's always had kind of strange nuances, but if you download uh
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the Adrenaline driver, you can go in there and enable things like Rage Mode and other things to get a little bit better performance out of your GPU because of some autotuning that's built in. But maxing out your power limit and more importantly maxing out your fan curve or trading acoustics for cooling
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can get you a little better performance because of the fact that the GPUs scale heavily with temperature. Unlike CPUs which will go full speed as long as they're not over their power limit and they haven't hit the TJ Maxx, they will run full speed up until they hit one degree above TJ Maxx, then they'll start
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clocking. Whereas GPUs, on the other hand, have an entire sliding curve.
So, as the temperature goes up, even just a few degrees at a time, you'll start seeing boost bins change based on temperature. It's very much by design.
Every GPU runs overclocked out of the box these days. Every GPU, whether it's
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a base model, MSRP model, or a custom matrix like you see on the desk right here, all are overclocked out of the box. You might be going, "Well, wait a minute.
That it doesn't say overclocked on the box. It's just a basic MSRP." That's because Nvidia GPUs all use what's called GPU Boost.
And this has
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been around since like 2012, 2011 where if there's power limit available and there's temperature limit available and there's voltage available, push the clocks until one of those per cap reasons or performance cap reasons are met. Usually the number one reason a
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performance limit is met is voltage. But 50 series is different.
They love voltage and they can go very high on voltage. It's usually power limit that they hit first regardless of whether it's a lower-end card or a higherend card.
So, by maxing out the power slider if you have available limit to it and
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allowing your fans to run faster will offset the extra heat you can generate by allowing it to pull more power, which will give you more steady clocks. Now, steady clock means you hit your max boost.
It said 2300 MHz is the base clock for Nvidia, but guess what? We can run at 2600 MHz because of the fact that
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those three criterias haven't been maxed out yet. So by allowing your fan to run higher means you can keep it cooler which means you take the temperature perf cap reason more or less out of the equation.
Then what you can start doing too if you want is start playing around the frequency or the the core overclocks
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maybe 25 at a time plus 25 at a time. So start with 25 and then 50 and then 75 and 100 and once again play around until you find instabilities.
The colder you can keep the card the more stable it will be. There is an absolute log
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logarithmic scale there when it comes specifically to temperature and stability. That's why the colder we can get the card with like XOC stuff, the farther we can push the frequencies even without touching voltage.
So, I think it's one of those things where if you're
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trying to max out your system, it might be time to say, "Well, I'll just turn my headphones louder and let the thing sound like a haird dryer to keep it running as as fast as it possibly can." because the only way you can make up for your graphics card not getting the job done as well as you want is to make it
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run faster. Uh you can do the same thing for your CPU, but like I said, CPUs will run full speed until they hit their TJ Maxx.
They don't have a curve based into it. The only time you'll see frequencies sort of fluctuate is based on, you know, what the task is requiring of the CPU.
The CPU doesn't necessarily want to go
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all the way up to 5.8 GHz if it's not something that's fully loading the CPU. But if you're doing something that is fully loading the CPU, say you're rendering 3D modeling or something like that, they'll go full speed until, let's say, your TJ Maxx is 105, until you hit
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105 and then it will start to boost down. So you can make the CPU run cooler if you want by running your fans higher.
The real benefit of doing that is more longevity over potential degradation over time. Now, CPUs are actually designed to run at their max speeds for their rated life expectancy.
Now, it
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just makes us uncomfortable to see red numbers and knowing that we're basically running our our CPU at the red line if it were an RPM gauge at all times, but it's rated for that. It doesn't mean you have to do it that way.
Uh CPU coolers these days are so good, there's no
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reason you should be running at red line. Which brings me to my next point.
If you're starting to see hotter than normal temperatures, it's probably time to repaste your CPU cooler. If you felt like your CPU's been slowing down and your system's just becoming a little bit less responsive, you can always download a free utility like hardware info or
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heck, even MSI After Burner will show you CPU temperatures. And if you start to see those temperatures getting really high up into the 90s or anywhere near 100, your CPU is probably going to start spiking down the frequency really quick to save itself from going too hot.
Cuz
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if you go past TJ Maxx or Thermal Junction Max, then damage can occur if you stay there for too long. So, if you've noticed that your your CPU is doing that and say you've got a nice AIO or you've got a really nice air cooler and you're like, "This doesn't make sense." It's more than likely time for you to repaste uh your cooler.
Paste is
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not a set and forget and you never have to worry about it again. Paste is designed to not dry out as bad as it used to back in the day, but we're talking about systems that are 5 6 10 years old.
Depending on where you live, let's say you live in a very dry desert, you'd be surprised how dry that pace can
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actually get. and it looks like a dry lake bed when you take it apart.
You can see all the expansion and contraction that's taken place over time. And a lot of thermal paste these days are actually a little bit of a phase change where the colder they are, the thicker they are.
And then the hotter they get, the thinner they get because they want it to constantly evolve and fill in all the
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voids and cracks as temperature fluctuations happen over time. But eventually it can dry out or create big cracks in areas that you're not actually getting optimal cooling.
Thermal paste is cheap and you'd be surprised how much performance you're losing if you don't have a proper thermal paste application
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or your thermal paste application has expired. So consider doing that.
Uh the best way to determine if your system's overheating, especially if you haven't applied an overclock, download hardware hardware info 64, go to your CPU package tab or look at your core package, your
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core drop down and look at the temperatures. And if it's getting in a temperature that's too hot, the numbers will turn red because it knows what your CPU is and it knows what the thermal junction max is and it will tell you red numbers.
These are not okay. Then you know it's time to change your thermal paste.
Now SSDs don't like to be full.
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SSDs require a certain amount of the drive to be available for caching. If your drive is full and your your drive is showing red when you go to your this PC, it's time to download Revo Uninstaller and start uninstalling the crap on your system that you don't need
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because the more full your drive gets above 90%, the slower the drive is going to be. Now, obviously, a 90% full 4 TBTE drive and a 90% full 1 TB drive are different numbers, but it's not about the actual amount of data that's on your drive.
It's how much percentage of the
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drive is being utilized. So, you can find all kinds of information and all kinds of deep dives into this topic if you want to learn more about that.
But the worst thing you could possibly do is fill up your SSD. Now, SSD prices really sort of suck right now because they are coming out of the same factories and
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such as RAM and they use many of the same components. And so, SSDs are also something that's being bought up and hoovered up as fast as you can for these data centers that are building out these a AI data farms cuz they need storage as well.
So, if you can get yourself
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another drive, if you have one that's full and you are going, "Man, I just I I I this is all I've got. I've got my games on here.
I can't take anything off. My my drive is full.
I've outgrown my drive." You have a couple of options. If you've got a lot of movies or you got
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a lot of images, you've got a lot of audio files or whatever, it's maybe time to get yourself a cheap external drive or something to offload that stuff onto to get your SSD back into a safe percentage of availability. I try not to ever let my drives go more than 80% full
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just for that reason I just described. It's also not unfeasible to get yourself like an older gen 3 M.2 or something because you don't need to have crazy fast storage.
It is kind of like one of the biggest lies we've ever been told is that you've got to have Gen 5 14,000
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megabytes per second read and 13,000 megabytes per second right. That's all cool and all, but guess what?
That only really shows its its amazingness if you're moving really big files in some sort of a desk bench a disc benchmark
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utility. Beyond that, when it comes to normal day-to-day usage, I don't think I could have a single person use a Gen 3 system, a Gen 4 system, and a Gen 5 system that are identical and be able to really tell the difference on which one is on which because Gen 3 is still 3500
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megabytes per second. That is significantly faster than 2.5 in SSDs, which capped out at about 550 megabytes per second.
So, if you're still on like a 2.5 in SSD on a SATA connector, you
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are capped out at about 550 megabytes per second. In the best case scenario, you're probably doing and moving around small files and loading up programs anywhere between the 250 to 300 megabytes per second range.
To jump from that to a Gen 3 SSD,
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3500 megabytes per second is nearly six times the speed. Gen 4 is cap at about 7,500 megabytes per second.
And then Gen 5 caps out at about 14,500. You you can see there's like a there's like a doubling, right?
There's like a factor
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of two every time we go up. But it's not going to matter for most people unless you're constantly moving around big files because when you're loading games and you're doing random tasks in Windows, you're moving around small files.
You know, you could download something like Crystal Disc Mark or whatever if you're really curious as to how fast your drive is, but I'm telling
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you right now, it's it's one of those it's one of those great lies of the PC industry is that we just have to max out these specs. Just like thinking you have to have, you know, 32 gigs or more of system RAM, otherwise it's just not it's obsolete these days.
Same thing with storage. Capacity for general consumers
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is king over speed, especially if we're talking about anything Gen 3 or newer when it comes to an M.2. Now, if you're running like an old MS SATA or something like that, it might be time to upgrade.
But my recommendation here is like I started to say a moment ago, if your drive is full and you're just like, man,
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I got nothing I can move this stuff on to. This is this is it.
Maybe try and find yourself a a gently used Gen 3 or something from someone. I mean, most people try not to sell their drives because you can always data uh data security being a thing.
Obviously, you would have to do a very
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like low-level format to get rid of and use a special utility to truly get rid of all the data on the drive. But if you are able to find an inexpensive Gen 3 somewhere or uh heck, even like if you can find a 2.5 in SSD that you can throw
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into your system, a 500 gig or a 1 TB to throw all of those random files and you're hanging on to that are not that important to just let them sit there as like long-term storage solution, but keep your M.2 two more available without running it into a cash issue. Any of those scenarios are better than just
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letting the drive sit there full. So, those are just some of the things I think you can do right now that cost you nothing.
If you have a really old system you just haven't touched, and you go through each one of these points I just mentioned, I bet you could get a significant improvement in your system. The number one thing though of all of
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this that I mentioned today that I can guarantee is affecting older systems is going to be those startup items and the amount of things getting loaded into memory on systems that are maybe a little bit lacking on the amount of memory that they have. Then just freeing that up alone will make the responsiveness and snappiness of your
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system uh come back and it can buy you some more time for you know really this feels like the end of the world not really the end of the world but like the movie with Seth Rogan end of the world but for PC like we just went to the liquor store we got ourselves something to eat and then suddenly the rapture
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just happened I guess which makes this perfectly I'm getting better at the 3D print stuff and this is a skull from Diablo I I'm going to do do some painting and stuff on there. I'm kind of trying to get better at uh you know, making sure that the the prints are set up properly cuz I
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do want to start utilizing them for some case mods. I think it it could be really fun and exciting.
All right, guys. What are your best suggestions for people with older systems that are trying to just extend their lifespan before spending money to get the most out of it that wouldn't cost anything.
I mean, we
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could all say go buy more RAM, go buy a faster GPU, go buy a faster CPU, but you know what? if you have no budget.
None of those are real suggestions, are they? We'll do another video soon about when the right time to upgrade is now when it comes to end of life on certain older
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Intel and AMD systems and rumors of new stuff coming. We'll try and talk about that perfect potential sweet spot of when it's time to upgrade, but this is about free.
All right, guys. Put your best suggestions down below.
Maybe we'll pin the best one. We'll see you guys in the next one.