This is a really good point. Everytime a youtuber does a test like this, it's with high end hardware. And it would be much more interesting with average hardware, or even low end hardware. I would imagine that the results would show much bigger performance gains on the clean build.
Definitely would have a higher impact. If it's only 4% difference due to background tasks taking up 4% of resources on a high end machine, that might be 10-20++% depending on how low we go.
One of the main reasons is to run the latest games, another is to give sponsors a reason to support the channel. I agree that there should be someone out there that does testing with low-medium setups, but it needs to be done from the very start and stay that way for consistency (it's not as interesting as you imagine).
In the old days I had a .bat file that taskkilled a whole bunch of things I didn't need for gaming and I'd launch it before running my games - was actually pretty useful at the time
He did a test on a 4 core system regarding the fps loss when doing something else in the background i.e. streaming, and the fps difference was much bigger ruclips.net/video/lLL_mxFg_Jc/видео.html
I disagree, if you mean that it would had simulated ''average Linus viewer's scenario. Because i think average Linus techtips viewers PC is a bit above Steam average. I mean this is tech-channel and most PC people don't care so much about tech. This channel's viewer average CPU core count would be 6 cores, maybe? But as an average PC experiement, steam spec-PC would had been cool.
But we all know, that with quad core you can't have much backround softwares while gaming. My bro has 4/4 CPU, and with someting like Warzone + Google chrome it was a nightmare. He had 8gb RAM tho, maybe that was bigger cause.
agreed i was having trouble with CoD:Warzone, the game would barely hit 70fps on a GTX 1080 and low settings, sometimes it would lag terrible, after inspecting the task manager i noticed the ram usage was up to 15gb and my HDD usage which is only for storage(files movies photos etc) 100% after some digging found out my W11 was using it for the virtual memory after switching the virtual memory to the SSD the game hits +100 fps on high settings w/o problems
@likafoss3677 I only play 2 games with friends. PUBG and Lethal company. PUBG hits 100% usage on my i5-8600k and I can't figure out why it's the only game that bogs down that hard.
I agree 100%. I've been screaming for years when people say "All you need is a 6 core CPU for gaming (or 4 once upon a time). Look at these benchmarks!" Except those benchmarks are run on a cleanroom benchmark setup install. What about the real world? In my experience the extra couple cores make a big difference by the time you got 40 chrome tabs, Nvidia game recording, discord + Crisp, etc etc.
especially since in their particular usecase the difference was literally "I have to guess which is clean and dirty either way" while in a real world case, with a not completely decked out PC the case might actually be "Oh there is a realistic difference between 60 FPS and 47FPS"
No, doing it on a lowend machine is like preaching to the choir. A midrange, I understand and agree. It's what most people are rocking, so it's what we'd want to see and want tested.
This reminds me of the legendary "Game Accelerator" which used to close every background process (including explorer, even your start menu disappeared) and changed the windows theme from the XP one to the Windows 95 one. It was the only way I could get acceptable performance in some games at the time. Good times.
I used the hell out of that little tool. I think I was still on Vista with only 4GB of RAM at the time, so it was a huge boost in performance. Like downloading RAM lmao
As someone who grew up with a bad computer, I've mastered keeping my Windows running fast whist still being kinda cluttered. Even now as an adult with a good computer, I still regularly use the same tricks even though I don't have to.
@@nitinarora6673 install windows with language : World then its nearly already debloated just need to remove a lil bit then its done.. But you can go further and remove unnecessary windows features you don't use and disable useless windows services, you can even tweak windows to high performance mode (removing the fancy feature) change power plan, remove Storage indexing etc. etc. that will gave you best result. I do agree with OP, when you have previous weaker system all you can do is to tweak the system software side since you don't have a way (money) to upgrade the hardware side. But even getting a more powerful high end PC now the habit of optimizing Windows never changes and since its a higher end i can now also tweak BIOS to further optimize the hardware side.
Haha i can totally relate, grew up using my parents potato computer. Always enamored with gaming pcs etc, finally bought one some years ago. Helps to appreciate a fast, sharp pc
same, but how bro??? pls tell me because I checked my idle RAM usage and its 5 gigabites and i wasnt even doing anything. I disabled all background tasks and everything is turned off, and 5.8 gigs of ram out of 12. And i was surprised when he said 5 gigs usage even tho he had bloatware. Bro what??? someone pls tell me how
I'd be interested in a comparison between DELL and HP, I feel like HP ships way more annoying bloatware out of the box. (both are really bad when it comes to preinstalled shit though)
@@UncleKennysPlace Fuck yes, i did a clean windows install on a neighbor hp laptop, the performance difference was insane, like, HP's bloat is so bad, the boot time went from literally minutes to about 45 seconds (mechanical hard drive)
still worth noting the dirty drive is still a clean install. When your Pc get's real dirty is when your one drive is syncing, your corsair ICUE is controlling your custom RGB keyboard set-ups, your Afterburner is controlling your custom fan settings etc etc. This rig is more like me. Fresh yet dirty in mind but it yet has to turn real dirty
A real dirty drive would be one that has been run for years with no maintenance. No drive optimizations, no disk cleanups run, file fragmentation, left over junk from things previously installed then uninstalled. For a proper test they should give the “dirty” drive to my friend to use for a few weeks, he’ll probably throw in a couple trojans and other malware by the time he’s finished lol. Now _that’s_ dirty!
@@jigz7337 my current rig has been running almost 24/7 since 2015. and it's still mostly fine. I say without knowing how it would run after a fresh install lol.
Hey LTT, could you start adding frametimes when doing these tests? Most of the time having "low" fps is fine, but it's the micro stutters that become annoying.
@@AwkwaBear Although it would be nice if the listed frame time statistics as well, any inconsistencies in the frame times will also impact the 99% minimum frames. The further the 99% framerate confidence interval is from the mean, the less consistent your frame rate is (and therefore frame times). For example, the CS:GO chart shows the 99% minimum is 40.4% lower than the mean for the clean and 41.9% lower for the dirty. That means that the dirty run had a slightly larger standard deviation (the frame times varied more) than the clean run. If you do a benchmark and your 99% minimum fps is very similar to your average fps, then you know you have very consistent frame times 99% of the time. You could go even further with 99.9% frame minimums. In terms of actual frame time numbers, you can work out that 99% of frames had a frame time of 3.97ms or lower for the clean and 4.27ms or lower for the dirty based on their 99% framerate minimums. It's all the same info just in a different form. The only extra info I'd like to see is a frame-time vs frame graph, since that can give you info amount spiking frame times that the average and 99% stats might not show.
Absolutely need graphs of frame time data on performance tests. It's possible to get used to a low frame rate, it's not at all possible to adapt to frame time spikes. Even just a couple frames every few seconds taking 2x time feels terrible. Like legitimately headache inducing bad.
This is the comment I was looking for. This is the real data that matters for how good or bad a game feels, and it's frustrating that it's not more commonly acknowledged over simply just fps. There's no way the folks at LTT aren't aware of this, it's just not as buzzwordy and search term friendly as fps.
you should do this test again with low end hardware and even the same ssd, but make differant partitions because even the ssd`s can have a slight differance on performance
I actually would like to see this test redone with more average components and also with lower end components. It's obvious that having more bloat will affect your performance, but I'm more interested in how badly it affects the performance. Is it worth it to go crazy with closing things down or not.
The point is it does affect your performance, no matter how powerful your PC. So only install apps that you really need, and if you're not getting the FPS you want in a particular game with your particular hardware, close apps that you're not using to see if you can get a bit more performance back.
Sorry, but no. This was a cartoonish test. Does having programs running in the background make a miniscule difference? Sure. Does anybody who actually knows how to use a computer have Skype and multiple *bad* antivirus programs running at startup? No, of course not. They had to make up a totally dumb scenario to make the video dramatic enough.
I have an old Dell desktop from 2011 I decommission it mine I got my MSI prebuilt from Walmart. I recently learned you can capture the gaming PC with a capture card it's less stress on your gaming computer. I recommission my Dell it takes forever to boot up I uninstall unnecessary programs programs I don't use anymore and just garbage files I don't use. I'm not paying $100 again for my editing software
5:20 Windows Explorer is responsible for the taskbar and a couple other parts of the Windows GUI. It's always supposed to be running and if you click "Restart," it will refresh your taskbar. It is not necessarily Windows bloatware.
I can definitely say, ending a few processes makes my pc go from being able to run games at to ultra smoothly, always worth giving task manager a check if you want the best performance
when I was on a quad core I5 this was true but I cannot get a single FPS worth of improvement from debloating now that I'm on a 12 core Ryzen CPU. I'm wondering if the difference in the video was down to a lack of RAM because 16gigs is barely enough these days for gaming and multitasking. (If anyone has any tips for tuning up windows further I'd like to hear it) when I turn on my computer these days I end up with 150-200 processes and 3-5 gigs of RAM usage, then when I launch everything I could possibly ever need open I get 200-250 processes and 8-10 gigs of RAM usage I see zero differences in FPS numbers with and without overlays (rivatuner, geforce, steam fps counter, reshade fps counter) zero differences after running win 10 debloater zero difference with and without 100ish chrome tabs and 20 or so extensions installed on top of chrome I've even started disabling a few microsoft processes in msconfig but there's probably still a few more I can turn off. (If anyone has any tips for tuning up windows further I'd like to hear it)
@@jordanlazarus7345 Honestly, outside of ensuring you have enough RAM for whatever you're doing (either by killing processes, adding more RAM, or both), disabling unnecessary startup applications, and maybe activating "Game Mode" in windows (which effectively just automatically kills processes when you start up a game), there's not much you can do other than just upgrading your PC. Windows is pretty stubborn about what it runs, with or without your permissions, and you can't change much. Running things on an SSD, especially your OS, will help a ton across the board as well.
While the performance difference is extremely minimal on a high end desktop, bloat DOES make a noticeable difference if you are a laptop user. When I bought my Dell XPS, I did a completely clean install of windows about a week after getting it. Doing so added nearly 3 hours to the battery life of the computer. It also made it feel noticeably faster when plugged in.
@@ahar1401 I’m not saying it’s isn’t trust me I used plenty of low low end hardware before. I’m just saying Dell hp and then but dell especially is a bad contender to it. Cuz they put low hardware stuff that would barely meet Windows minimum hardware requirements and load it it with junk like McCafee and norten and a bunch of other junk. That’s why it’s better when you get a new pc from anyone like hp or Dell or whatever company just delete every partition on the drive and reinstall windows.
I discover that I'm using almost 15 GB out of 16 GB Ram without even playing game, just using Firefox, Google Chrome and few other things. I'm using over 90% of my ram without playing a game, no wonder I have stuttering and freezing while I play games.
This is why I've been watching channels like this since I was like 13, I'm not the smartest tech guy, but I've learned quite a bit from passively watching.
how, lol. I currently have Wallpaper Engine, Steam, Discord, Spotify and some other programs running as well as 20 YT tabs, several of them 4K, am downloading a Steam game while watching this 4K video, and I'm using 13GB
Linus, this REALLY should have been done with completely AVERAGE hardware - most people don't have 6-12 cores, most people don't have a 30-series RTX card, most people don't have 3200mhz RAM, most people ... the list goes on. A lot of us would much prefer a video about reducing bloatware on the "steam average computer", and speeding up crap on older laptops/machines!
Well a mid tier new system would either be 4/8 or 6/12 core/threads and 3200mhz ram is now common with new builds. And if the gpus were available a 3060 would be plausible.
yea you abolsutely right, but hey, say thanks he did that test with a 11700K instead of a 5900x... because I can tell you with the 5900x the differences are even less significant than the actual showcased results of this test. i did a similar test back on last year after the 5900x was released and I got it myself (paired with a 3080 and 64 gb of 3600mhz cl16 ram), and the differences never go above 2% with the mentioned cpu. And no matter the amount of junk you run at background.
CC Cleaner and McAfee should be included in the thumbnail they slow down your PC a lot more than they help, and so can be said about many other cleaning software or AVs...
@@choppings54 absolutely, these softwares mostly make it worse. But what if you're stupid? What's the best compromise between performance usage and protection? I'd go for a paid MalwareBytes personally (even though I don't use anything)
@@iluvpandas2755 Well they're kinda ignorant, you gotta be to buy a T2 chip / Apple Silicon Mac. You gotta not know about Apple's unethical engineering, how they are building so that a consumable part's death bricks multi thousand dollars machine...
"What's Windows Explorer doing? I don't even have it open!" Would've thought Linus knew that explorer is the shell. It runs the Taskbar and Start menu among other things. Not just when you open folders 🤔
What I've found is that percent CPU usage and percent memory are basically irrelevant; It's some complicated crap involving branch prediction, or core handoffs, or hard drive access, or audio processing priority offloading, or particle effects queuing up in the GPU, or shifting disk caches, something that doesn't show up on task manager, that causes EXTENSIVE micro-stutter and macro-stutter when trying to multitask. "Why did the whole render just freeze for 1/2 second?" "Why does this only happen when a browser is open?" "Why can I run the game fine at 80fps right up until a pitched battle when there are frames that cost several seconds to render?"
You just accurately described what we all think or wonder or don't know how to put into words. "My benchmarks are all fine but something is WRONG!" Nicely put.
This. Absolutely this. Unless you're seriously into the IT field, diagnosing a performance problem is way more complicated and unpredictable than most think.
Just read "Modern Operating Systems' by A. Tannenbaum and you'll have all your answers there. Basically it's all about IRQs. You access disk data via IRQ, you communicate with the GPU via IRQ. Your keyboard is causing IRQs. Basically anything to do with talking to other components means IRQ.
5:20 it says windows explorer but it's actually just explorer. It contains the desktop, taskbar including the programs on them and that is why it has the restart option instead of end task. It gives you the option to restart it if it glitched. In older versions you could end explorer and you would just have a black screen with all the program windows that were not minimized on screen, without the taskbar it is much harder to get access to minimized windows. If cmd was open you could start it back up by typing explorer
Just like Linus mentioned, I would LOVE to see how much having a "dirty" pc would affect gaming performance if that PC was actually a really low end one. I am running a dual core CPU, 12 Gb of RAM DDR3, an HDD with no SSD, and on board graphics. Small difference could REALLY matter. I would like to see just how much it would actually make a difference.
It'd make a significant one. You'd be running the same software with half (or quarter? Idk 11700K specs) of the cores. For example, if I saw 5% background usage on my 5900X, I'd expect some process to have bugged out or an update to be running. Whereas on a dual core with the same per core performance, that could be 25-30%. That'd for sure be a bigger performance hog.
@@oldbot64 Cheap SSD's aren't a thing depending on the country. And the ones you do find have no DRAM cache, which you can guess goes as fast as a 7200RPM Hard Drive
@@polytelus my bad... I misunderstood ur comment. What do you mean cheap SSDs arent a thing lol... 240/480Gb SATA SSDs are very cheap. Less than 80 dollars. They have R/WR speeds that are at the very minimum 3-4 times faster than HDDs. That will be such a big improvement in performance for OP who is still using a HDD.
"If we had been running 8 gigs of RAM and a quad core CPU, we might have seen very different results" Me who just bought an i7 1165g7 quad core and 8gb ram last month: *Why must you hurt me this way*
@@criptin4075 yes but the game is still horribly optimized. It's basically completely reliant on single core performance, so even if you have some uber fancy graphics card, not much will change.
You should have tested it on weaker machines as well, since those are the ones who will be most affected. 25% of people are using 8GB of RAM and 5% are using 4GB. While not majority, its still a significant number of people.
i did, i have a 8GB laptop, GTX950M, i5, on a fresh install of windows after switching from Linux, i installed BF4, it played so smooth i thought it wasn't the same laptop
I would looooove to see a video of these tests on a 4 core 8gig ram setup. And, me being picky, id have liked to see these tests done on 1080p and 1440p to really show numerical differences in performance, just cuz a lot of people still run 1080p. And cuz id wanna be sure its actually a bigger difference 🤣
@@Mainancepatsaji I'd actually like to see something similar as well. 1080p is still the dominate gaming resolution, and ~54% of gamers have ram amounts other than 16 gb. I'd like to see lower increments tested.
6:56 I am confused. Linus: "With the render taking an additional 14 seconds" Clean: 7:15, Dirty: 7:23 - that difference is 8 seconds, that's almost half of what you just said. EDIT: Linus probably only had either his script or the numbers from the graph; can't really blame him, was just something funny that stood out to me.
Pro tip: Separate user accounts for gaming and general use. It won't stop ALL of the background services from installed bloat, but you can more finely tune what's installed system-wide versus per-user, so you can have the best of both worlds, mostly
Honestly I don't understand this comment can somebody explain it? I mean even if I separate by users I still need to use my razer synapse to have my dpi, polling rate in each user, etc. I also need to record my gameplay in the gaming user and I suppose since it's on the gaming user I need to have DaVinci in the gaming users. Same with my fans speed etc
@@elliotdeclet594 You didn't answer anything he was asking. He was asking what the separation of users does for performance when all of the bloat he could technically stop while gaming is needed in his use case. A separate user won't make the recording software less ram or cpu intensive just like anything controlling fan speeds. And yes, having no onboard memory on a mouse may be bad design but it apparently is what he has now. This is like me asking "How do I optimize X" and you answer "Just buy new X lol".
@@Slyfa187 then why dont you answer the question yourself and add your own advice instead of just criticizing my answer 🤨 Its just something to keep in mind when shopping for gaming accessories next time or something someone else can see and and keep in mind when buying accessories, could also take that advice and apply it to fan speeds, shouldnt set your fan curve in software but in bios Your comment is ultimately less helpful than mine
I have a high end pc. I have my chrome open with a lot of tabs, launchers (steam, epic, etc), AV, recording software, live wallpaper (wallpaper engine) chat apps like discord. All of this stuff and I don’t see any drop in performance. This works on a low end pc but high end, don’t even worry about it
Before the updated Age of Empires II having explorer.exe running would mess with the ground textures in Windows 7. I have task killed explorer.exe on computers I tried fixing that were extremely slow.
7:25 The important thing here is 1% lows, not really the average, and there is a 7% difference on CSGO, that's pretty huge. Plus 5% on both F1 and Hitman(Dartmoor) and 6% on Hitman(Dubai).
My backup HDD was failing and it would basically make windows die slowly while it was plugged in, was a real headache to backup things from it to a new one 😅🤦🏻
Indeed .. the taskbar icon is nothing more then that.. an icon to show that it is running… reason why a ton of spyware/malware/root kits don’t even have any icons that can be shown.
Watch Gamers Nexus pre-build test videos. They are doing benchmarks with and without preinstalled bloatware. And in some cases the difference is noticeable.
Would be interesting to see exactly how much hardware specs matter in this scenario. Because while the tested hardware saw a 3% drop in performance, what about low end hardware? The hit in performance could be much greater and thus the conclusion could be more serious than "it's okay". Also, I was expecting the dirty install to be cleaned by uninstalling stuff to see if that would help recover some of the lost performance. Also also, nothing was said about the fact that the two SSDs could have different performance scores and it would have been nice to see how they compare, just to make this test more robust to criticism.
This video is what happens when you're only exposed to high end stuff. Feels very much like the out of touch rich guy trying to give advice to a homeless guy. Why even test this on what most would consider a god tier setup?
Because everyone already knows how bloat cripples lower end systems. What this video is for, is for the highest echelon of gaming. When you have the best performance that money can buy, does it stand reason to be anal retentive with bloat? Same reason why gaming benchmarks are done with high end gpu's. No one gives a rat ass about your 'homeless guy' gpu. Sucks, but thats the reality of it.
@@empty3102 well its a show first of all and it shows you that if it can tank the perf of a high end machine like this then you can expect few times harder problems.
@@tim9605 then i guess you dont know what you are talking about, services.msc just shows services registered as windows services but i can in 5 minutes make you a program that starts you services without ever registering them as windows services. and then fork from that program effectivly bypassing windows services or utilizing them on a minimal level.
I would love to see how this performs with VR gaming. I've noticed that bloat seems to cause lots of microstutters in VR games, even simple ones like Beat Saber, while a clean PC install is a lot less jerky and nauseating.
RGB/peripheral software is usually the culprit. People have made batch files that kill programs known to cause issues so you can just run one of those before you play. But they wouldn't have a video with this solution so !!!
I feel like testing it with a quad core would have made for a more interesting video. I liked the testing setup, but just trying the high end system feels incomplete.
One thing to note when it comes to trying to manually clean up auto-start applications, it's useful to look at the services that are set to automatically restart when they are turned off. Some things that are set to start at startup will run background services indefinitely, even if you've closed the main application.
@@FirstLast-ge4yd They are in no way using punctuation correctly. They used three (3) commas in a row and 3 full stops for no reason with 2 spaces after them.
They don't go in depth with anything. They have a hypothesis, do the minimum "tests" to find a conclusion then script it to be ~10 minutes. If you want real testing, there's better channels for that.
When first started PC gaming, didn't have the room on the HDD to store crap, didn't have the horses to run crap. So kept it clean. Even though now have a Ryzen 3600X, 16GB of ram, 1TB SSD, etc... I keep it clean. Old habit I guess ;)
That how I remember my mom keeping our home computer 👍 My current setup is a 1tb ssd with a few games on it. Got a 2tb hdd for basic games and other programs. Keep that ssd clean asf
Linus, Amazon has motherboards for sale as “used-good” through “used- like new” they claim that these motherboards have “slight cosmetic damage/missing extras” which I find very strange. They are significantly cheaper than the new products and are sold via amazon themselves from their warehouse. A lot of people on a budget could use the knowledge of you guys testing out these products to see exactly what they mean by the conditions to see if its worth saving money there.
from what i have seen is that usualy they sell the board only with no parts or manuals or extras what so ever, which includes io shield and cables you might need and otherwise not get from other parts such as sata cables etc
these are basicly returns that are tested but might not have other stuff like screws and such or might have been dropped and have a scratch or something like that basicly not a problem
@@ModrunOfficial i assumed by the “missing extras” they meant: “You get the board only and nothing else” but still i think itd be interesting to see what they could possibly interpret as acceptable “good” level damage to a board without it interfering with the performance of the board, threatening the lifespan of the board, or potentially becoming a fire hazard in conditions that are not absolutely optimal for the boards health (ex: in a cheap case with not so great airflow)
Hey Linus! I was the random guy in the gray coat that just said hi! Unfortunately COVID sucks but that made my week regardless! Keep it up everyone at LMG thanks for all the videos you do. I’ll apply for a job when I graduate!
I'd be interested to see a "Dirty PC but with the bloat uninstalled" rather than just closing stuff to see if there's still an impact or if a fresh install is the only way to go.
@@josephschultz4097 stop and disable the service will stop things from restarting, would have been good to see what difference it would have made. Still interesting that they still noticed some improvement over the video though
@@pixlhound Hmm not sure if I can I'll check tomorrow after work, as putting in 11-12 hour days with extra 3 hours on top for driving to and from work. thanks I didn't even think about that option
Would love to see this test done again 4 gigs of ram and with 8 gigs of ram to be able to benchmark the difference between clean and dirty on different ram options. Even smaller processors. 4 core, 6 core, 8 core. I love that you did this test, But since your computers are made super powerful specifically to maintain high performance with programs running, we can barely see the difference. Btw, i love your channel and what you do. Thanks for the good content.
That’s right, smaller setups will have a big difference. Is like turning on the A/C on a 5.0 Mustang and turning on the A/C in the 1.0L 3 cylinder VW Up, is not te same when you have lots of power.
I’d love to see a comparison with a lower speck machine. I’m capping mine out every time I run a game, so it would be known if it would be better with less bloat.
Of course it would be better with no bloat. I always do a fresh install and then spend some time disabling or removing Windows built-in bloatware and data collecting stuff. Decrapify your Windows, man!
This test will be much more useful with the “avarage gaming machine” for a simple thing, it Is much more noticable a 15 hp loss in a Ferrari or in a Fiat Panda?
Microsoft really needs to introduce an 'END TASK and BLOCK until next startup' option. I have experienced so many apps that force restart when you end task, I hate it.
TL;DR: It doesn't really matter if your system have the ressources to handle the background apps and your game. And it will probably matter if you're tight on specs.
quick tip: If dragging windows around feels laggy and sometimes pressing on network icon and it get stuck scanning for shares. Open Task Manager locate "Windows Explorer" right click and select "restart" all your windows will disappear for a while and it will get reloaded to the memory. Is like rebooting windows without rebooting it.
@@mastafull What specs do you have? Or might be a storage problem. I have a lot of stuff saved on my PC and I just put almost everything in the same place and never had that type of stuff happen, only a couple long loading times and once frozen for a second. Especially when looking at my hard drives.
That "dirty" drive was also a fresh windows with just some programs installed, or it was used for a year at least? Because in my eyes if it wasnt used for over some time, that slill counts as a clean windows, and the performance drop should be definetly more noticalbe at least in boot up and in program openings. I''m not sure about the fps, but 2-5 fps drop is nothing. But in the every day usage you should notice it's definitely slower with the junk you've collected in the past few months/years.
This is so true, if you've uninstalled (or sometimes just updated) a bunch of programs, they'll leave all kinds of junk. My startup times had gotten annoyingly bad (I feel so spoiled after all those years of waiting several minutes for windows xp to load on crappy laptops) but after a quick hit of the registry with CCleaner (some people don't like/trust this program, but it's never let me down so I don't give a...) and my boot times were back to good, but not clean install levels. Probably worth noting I have Windows fast startup disabled (because it caused issues with my crappy wacom drivers.) So startup time changes may be less noticable to others.
@@derptyderp5287 CCLeaner has the big benefit of not being Malware like most cleaners, so you could always do worse lol. I don't happen to use it anymore, but it isn't a killer like other cleaning programs
Yes that is certainly something you can feel, "just sitting at the machine". Opening, closing and loading in different environments will be more clunky, jittery etc. Just depends if your going from clean to dirty or from dirty to clean if you feel the difference. If i dont "clean" my os and make it run smooth, then i can always feel some interference, in games, browsing, opening and closing apps etc.
[Re : commented] I remember first time buying a Dell laptop on a store It didn't look like it was horribly garbage Until I bought it and checked the task manager The first thing I said was "Bruh"
But that's what you get. If you're even remotely competent with computers, do a fresh install and remove all the bloatware yourself. Sure takes time and effort but at least no more junk inside.
@@MCAlexisYT Yeah it's something they do to people who don't have as much knowledge about computers, and trick them into paying more for less, the intel cpu's in laptops sound amazing until you look at the actual specs. core i7 with only 4 cores.
i mean... a laptop is still just a computer, the same as any other. the form factor is a bit different, but the general end results wouldn't really be any different.
@@ikunaruLIVE yea... but my point was, it would just be repeating the video. the results would be the same. having "a bunch of software" running in the background, whatever the programs are and whatever the system is... is going to have a small-but-notable impact on system performance... even if it's "good" stuff like antivirus/ antispyware, etc.
@@tzxazrael yes but that effect mostly matters on system that are lower spec than what is showed on the video. System resources, specially on lower end hardware are what matters because not a lot of people here, (imo) doesn't have the spec showed in the video. And why just stop at laptops? Just try out any spec PC from lower to high end to show how much it really matters to make the test more valuable.
Been sitting on a comp all day every day for 30 years. Never had any doubt that a fresh win install made everything faster. Though it is getting more difficult to tell these days.
CTT (Chris Tech Tips) -- In Task Manager: You can left-click the process, then press ALT+E to "end task" instead of right-click to open context menu, then left-click to select "end task" (saves about one second per process) :)
when you force close applications, they can often restart themselves, causing a greater drag on the pc for a while. Windows sucks for actually closing programs
It actually doesn't if you're remotely competent at using software or reading words. Literally a few tabs over in task manager, there's a tab titled "services"
Personally having clean system and playing games that use near 100% cpu/gpu, even communication program makes a noticeable difference. I see and feel big difference between TS3 and DC
hey linus 5:21 explorer is a part of the ui (operates as) (pretty much just the taskbar) thats why it operates in the bg hope you read this and find out smth new!
While pretending to be working, you mean? I can't even read an article and listen to music at the same time without losing focus and comprehension. You should consider separating the two, and then maybe you'll finish work sooner and have more free time as well? I guess it depends on the work, though...
so what you're telling me is, all the mandatory always-on applications that every gaming publisher seems hellbent on foisting on everybody, are killing the performance of their own games, regardless of the hardware they're installed on.... 👌
The thing is though, those probably aren't the major contributors actually. The Corsair and Anti-Malware stuff would be the heavy-hitters here, and Linus wasn't even stopping services. That's probably why the FPS actually going down on the last test happened, because services were starting processes back up in the background when they started after terminating, instead of running in more of a steady-state. Obviously it would also depend heavily on whether other launchers are updating games while you're running a different game under a different launcher. I'd imagine some will go ahead and update which could add a lot of network, disk, and some CPU activity for decompression. Some launchers probably detect if you're running a game even when not under their launcher, like if you're in exclusive fullscreen mode, but I definitely won't give them the benefit of the doubt on that. Ironically if they ran anything more graphically demanding, they would have seen much closer to 1% difference since the game would likely bottleneck on GPU, which isn't serving background processes. Therefore this stuff is hardly "killing" performance--it really depends on whether it's eating into bottlenecked resources--therefore your mileage WILL vary by game, hardware, and background process. And when you throw a multitude of different applications at it, it's hard to draw quantifiable conclusions about particular background processes are the worst unless you (correctly) terminate things one-by-one to determine what is making the biggest difference. This isn't a Gamers Nexus video so obviously it's not going to go that far. Still, when you sort by CPU, in Task Manager details, that gives you a good finger-in-the-wind as to what is going to be the most impactful.
can you make a video that shows whether or not dual monitors affect FPS in game, and how different it is with just a single monitor (if that video hasn't already been done)
"If we had been running 8 gigs of RAM and a quad core CPU, we might have seen very different results"
I see those results every day
I feel ya, used to play pubg on a 4 core and 8 gigs. It was a pain in the ass.
2 core 16GB ddr3 laptop reporting in
How about 8gigs of ram an i 5-3210-M and integrated graphics?
4gb and 2 cores laptop goes br brr
@@kim-hendrikmerk4163 how about playing beamng on an intel pentium g645 and 10 GB ram? :^
Why this testing wasn't done with the "steam average computer" I'll never understand
This is a really good point. Everytime a youtuber does a test like this, it's with high end hardware. And it would be much more interesting with average hardware, or even low end hardware. I would imagine that the results would show much bigger performance gains on the clean build.
Definitely would have a higher impact. If it's only 4% difference due to background tasks taking up 4% of resources on a high end machine, that might be 10-20++% depending on how low we go.
He even mentions it himself but he can't put his 1000 watt sponsored powersupply to a gtx 750ti system right ? xD
One of the main reasons is to run the latest games, another is to give sponsors a reason to support the channel. I agree that there should be someone out there that does testing with low-medium setups, but it needs to be done from the very start and stay that way for consistency (it's not as interesting as you imagine).
exactly this was a waste of 11 mins. what did we learn? absoultely nothing other than what was obvious
In the old days I had a .bat file that taskkilled a whole bunch of things I didn't need for gaming and I'd launch it before running my games - was actually pretty useful at the time
i still do that lol
Thats just what Razer cortex does lmao
@@cherrypepsi2815 razer cortex is bloat ware
Man you made me feel old
True, I still have the OCD of keeping back ground processes clean since those days lol
Closed multiple apps in task manager. Checks: they have all restarted themselves.
i love when they do that
@@skibidiaizen-r1e Search for "services" and "Task Scheduler" and deactivate anything you don't want (except for system services obviously).
"Oh no, my render takes 8 seconds longer and CSGO has 20 less FPS!"
I really think you should have tested this on a lower spec machine.
@@mariat5860 Nah bish, it's NNN.
man has his priorities
@: B May God accompany us on this mighty journey.
He did a test on a 4 core system regarding the fps loss when doing something else in the background i.e. streaming, and the fps difference was much bigger
ruclips.net/video/lLL_mxFg_Jc/видео.html
@@mariat5860 it's NNN nobody is falling for this
This video would've been more useful if the tests were done on the average Steam user's computer.
Lmao
I agree, but the aim of the video was to show how it affects newer hardware PCs, not the most used ones.
I disagree, if you mean that it would had simulated ''average Linus viewer's scenario. Because i think average Linus techtips viewers PC is a bit above Steam average. I mean this is tech-channel and most PC people don't care so much about tech. This channel's viewer average CPU core count would be 6 cores, maybe? But as an average PC experiement, steam spec-PC would had been cool.
But we all know, that with quad core you can't have much backround softwares while gaming. My bro has 4/4 CPU, and with someting like Warzone + Google chrome it was a nightmare. He had 8gb RAM tho, maybe that was bigger cause.
agreed i was having trouble with CoD:Warzone, the game would barely hit 70fps on a GTX 1080 and low settings, sometimes it would lag terrible, after inspecting the task manager i noticed the ram usage was up to 15gb and my HDD usage which is only for storage(files movies photos etc) 100% after some digging found out my W11 was using it for the virtual memory after switching the virtual memory to the SSD the game hits +100 fps on high settings w/o problems
The TLDR: With a high end PC you won't be able to really tell a difference. The lower the PC specs, the more you'll feel it.
The difference was massive when going from single core to dual core back in the day.
Thanks
Then buy a console.
@@omegacon4 ?
And that is why I have 64GB of RAM
You cannot do this test without focusing on the 1% lows. Average fps is never affected to the same degree as the frame drops
TBH if you don't run out of RAM it is ok (unless you game on 2/4 core CPU)
@@A-BYTE64 idk I'm thinking of reinstalling Windows on my system and I have a 6-core i5-9600k that's bottle-necking my gaming ambitions XD
@@likafoss bruh
@likafoss3677 I only play 2 games with friends. PUBG and Lethal company. PUBG hits 100% usage on my i5-8600k and I can't figure out why it's the only game that bogs down that hard.
@@likafoss SAME i have the same exact cpu and its the only thing holding me back bruh i swear
I get an "activate windows" popup that drops me from 144 to 120 or 90... not even a hardware issue.. and i have a license
OneSyncSvc managed to cause severe lag by 100%-ing an SSD recently and I don't even use MS People/Contacts/Email/OneDrive...
@@Lodinn The amount of times I've seen random unused Windows apps somehow taking up more than 50% of my system resources is ridiculous
@@chandler1086 turn off background apps, that helped me
@@TheBorees they’ll just start up again without you knowing, like what linus here showed, I say just delete them
windows speeding ticket. 'oy mate yer screen is going too fast'
Why didn’t you try this on a midrange or lower end machine? The impact would probably be notably bigger
Edit: typo
Yeah, that would have made a lot more sense.
I agree 100%. I've been screaming for years when people say "All you need is a 6 core CPU for gaming (or 4 once upon a time). Look at these benchmarks!"
Except those benchmarks are run on a cleanroom benchmark setup install. What about the real world? In my experience the extra couple cores make a big difference by the time you got 40 chrome tabs, Nvidia game recording, discord + Crisp, etc etc.
especially since in their particular usecase the difference was literally "I have to guess which is clean and dirty either way" while in a real world case, with a not completely decked out PC the case might actually be "Oh there is a realistic difference between 60 FPS and 47FPS"
No, doing it on a lowend machine is like preaching to the choir. A midrange, I understand and agree. It's what most people are rocking, so it's what we'd want to see and want tested.
remember no nut november
This reminds me of the legendary "Game Accelerator" which used to close every background process (including explorer, even your start menu disappeared) and changed the windows theme from the XP one to the Windows 95 one. It was the only way I could get acceptable performance in some games at the time. Good times.
You just took me back. I forgot about that
Was so young, I thought I broke the computer, too scared to tell my dad 🤣
I used the hell out of that little tool. I think I was still on Vista with only 4GB of RAM at the time, so it was a huge boost in performance. Like downloading RAM lmao
@@mastafull Don't use Vista..
@@EikottXD "was"
As someone who grew up with a bad computer, I've mastered keeping my Windows running fast whist still being kinda cluttered. Even now as an adult with a good computer, I still regularly use the same tricks even though I don't have to.
How you clean your windows pc man
@@nitinarora6673 install windows with language : World then its nearly already debloated just need to remove a lil bit then its done.. But you can go further and remove unnecessary windows features you don't use and disable useless windows services, you can even tweak windows to high performance mode (removing the fancy feature) change power plan, remove Storage indexing etc. etc. that will gave you best result.
I do agree with OP, when you have previous weaker system all you can do is to tweak the system software side since you don't have a way (money) to upgrade the hardware side.
But even getting a more powerful high end PC now the habit of optimizing Windows never changes and since its a higher end i can now also tweak BIOS to further optimize the hardware side.
What’s ur tricks
Haha i can totally relate, grew up using my parents potato computer. Always enamored with gaming pcs etc, finally bought one some years ago. Helps to appreciate a fast, sharp pc
same, but how bro??? pls tell me because I checked my idle RAM usage and its 5 gigabites and i wasnt even doing anything. I disabled all background tasks and everything is turned off, and 5.8 gigs of ram out of 12. And i was surprised when he said 5 gigs usage even tho he had bloatware. Bro what??? someone pls tell me how
You should really do this on Dell laptops. Amount of FPS gains with fresh windows is insane.
yeah i need a fresh install on Windows after using Linux for a while, i swear if someone told me it wasn't my laptop i'd agree
I'd be interested in a comparison between DELL and HP, I feel like HP ships way more annoying bloatware out of the box. (both are really bad when it comes to preinstalled shit though)
@@dxlusi0nal Yeah, in my experience, HP's "helpful" software is anything but.
oh god yes. averaging 100+fps on a fresh windows install on my dell laptop. slowly decreases to 40 average as time goes on. absolutely crazy
@@UncleKennysPlace Fuck yes, i did a clean windows install on a neighbor hp laptop, the performance difference was insane, like, HP's bloat is so bad, the boot time went from literally minutes to about 45 seconds (mechanical hard drive)
still worth noting the dirty drive is still a clean install. When your Pc get's real dirty is when your one drive is syncing, your corsair ICUE is controlling your custom RGB keyboard set-ups, your Afterburner is controlling your custom fan settings etc etc.
This rig is more like me. Fresh yet dirty in mind but it yet has to turn real dirty
exactly I real dirty install is one that has been running for a couple years.
A real dirty drive would be one that has been run for years with no maintenance. No drive optimizations, no disk cleanups run, file fragmentation, left over junk from things previously installed then uninstalled. For a proper test they should give the “dirty” drive to my friend to use for a few weeks, he’ll probably throw in a couple trojans and other malware by the time he’s finished lol. Now _that’s_ dirty!
I resetted and reinstalled windows the other day and the pc is smooth again
@@jigz7337 my current rig has been running almost 24/7 since 2015. and it's still mostly fine. I say without knowing how it would run after a fresh install lol.
@@ADMNtek my pc specs actually perform like theyre supposed to now, had a lot of bloatware
Hey LTT, could you start adding frametimes when doing these tests?
Most of the time having "low" fps is fine, but it's the micro stutters that become annoying.
Exactly. I'd rather like to play at a constant 30 or 40fps, rather than constantly switching between 60 and 10 every minute
isnt that what the 99%ile data shows?
@@AwkwaBear Although it would be nice if the listed frame time statistics as well, any inconsistencies in the frame times will also impact the 99% minimum frames. The further the 99% framerate confidence interval is from the mean, the less consistent your frame rate is (and therefore frame times). For example, the CS:GO chart shows the 99% minimum is 40.4% lower than the mean for the clean and 41.9% lower for the dirty. That means that the dirty run had a slightly larger standard deviation (the frame times varied more) than the clean run. If you do a benchmark and your 99% minimum fps is very similar to your average fps, then you know you have very consistent frame times 99% of the time. You could go even further with 99.9% frame minimums. In terms of actual frame time numbers, you can work out that 99% of frames had a frame time of 3.97ms or lower for the clean and 4.27ms or lower for the dirty based on their 99% framerate minimums. It's all the same info just in a different form.
The only extra info I'd like to see is a frame-time vs frame graph, since that can give you info amount spiking frame times that the average and 99% stats might not show.
Absolutely need graphs of frame time data on performance tests. It's possible to get used to a low frame rate, it's not at all possible to adapt to frame time spikes. Even just a couple frames every few seconds taking 2x time feels terrible. Like legitimately headache inducing bad.
This is the comment I was looking for. This is the real data that matters for how good or bad a game feels, and it's frustrating that it's not more commonly acknowledged over simply just fps. There's no way the folks at LTT aren't aware of this, it's just not as buzzwordy and search term friendly as fps.
you should do this test again with low end hardware and even the same ssd, but make differant partitions because even the ssd`s can have a slight differance on performance
I actually would like to see this test redone with more average components and also with lower end components. It's obvious that having more bloat will affect your performance, but I'm more interested in how badly it affects the performance. Is it worth it to go crazy with closing things down or not.
The point is it does affect your performance, no matter how powerful your PC. So only install apps that you really need, and if you're not getting the FPS you want in a particular game with your particular hardware, close apps that you're not using to see if you can get a bit more performance back.
Sorry, but no. This was a cartoonish test. Does having programs running in the background make a miniscule difference? Sure.
Does anybody who actually knows how to use a computer have Skype and multiple *bad* antivirus programs running at startup? No, of course not. They had to make up a totally dumb scenario to make the video dramatic enough.
@@NimjaIV yes but case in point, it would much more relatable and please the low end pc enthusiast which actually a whole lot of Linus viewers
I have an old Dell desktop from 2011 I decommission it mine I got my MSI prebuilt from Walmart. I recently learned you can capture the gaming PC with a capture card it's less stress on your gaming computer. I recommission my Dell it takes forever to boot up I uninstall unnecessary programs programs I don't use anymore and just garbage files I don't use. I'm not paying $100 again for my editing software
Yeah exactly, I literally don't get why they use a baller pc for this. 3% for this pc is nothing, for the other pc it would be way more....
5:20 Windows Explorer is responsible for the taskbar and a couple other parts of the Windows GUI. It's always supposed to be running and if you click "Restart," it will refresh your taskbar. It is not necessarily Windows bloatware.
underrated comment, how do they not know about that?
Yeah its basically your entire desktop except the wallpaper
Not anymore. Windows 11 Start and taskbar are WinRT BS and their own process
Yeah, it's pretty shocking Linus didn't know. I was probably 8 when I made this discovery.
@@AlLiberali how is WinRT BS i could say Win32 is BS (this i the runtime most of apps are running under still)
"Is bloatware killing your gains!?" -AthleanX
Lmao
it more like "BLOATWARE is Killing your Gains!"
Had to like and make it even so you dont get unbalanced likes
my exact thought reading the title! Nice to see fellow gym bros here
Thought the same!
I can definitely say, ending a few processes makes my pc go from being able to run games at to ultra smoothly, always worth giving task manager a check if you want the best performance
what are this processes you are talking about?
I tune up computers for a living, if youd like me to reply to this comment :)
@@frazho4eg Anything non essential or but avoid anything windows critical.
when I was on a quad core I5 this was true but I cannot get a single FPS worth of improvement from debloating now that I'm on a 12 core Ryzen CPU. I'm wondering if the difference in the video was down to a lack of RAM because 16gigs is barely enough these days for gaming and multitasking. (If anyone has any tips for tuning up windows further I'd like to hear it)
when I turn on my computer these days I end up with 150-200 processes and 3-5 gigs of RAM usage, then when I launch everything I could possibly ever need open I get 200-250 processes and 8-10 gigs of RAM usage
I see zero differences in FPS numbers with and without overlays (rivatuner, geforce, steam fps counter, reshade fps counter)
zero differences after running win 10 debloater
zero difference with and without 100ish chrome tabs and 20 or so extensions installed on top of chrome
I've even started disabling a few microsoft processes in msconfig but there's probably still a few more I can turn off.
(If anyone has any tips for tuning up windows further I'd like to hear it)
@@jordanlazarus7345 Honestly, outside of ensuring you have enough RAM for whatever you're doing (either by killing processes, adding more RAM, or both), disabling unnecessary startup applications, and maybe activating "Game Mode" in windows (which effectively just automatically kills processes when you start up a game), there's not much you can do other than just upgrading your PC. Windows is pretty stubborn about what it runs, with or without your permissions, and you can't change much. Running things on an SSD, especially your OS, will help a ton across the board as well.
finally. gaming
Drop avp men
Why only 6 likes
shut franzj tirgerbot vac ban
We was expecting that, don't we?
go play with hougoughavhe (jeff)
While the performance difference is extremely minimal on a high end desktop, bloat DOES make a noticeable difference if you are a laptop user. When I bought my Dell XPS, I did a completely clean install of windows about a week after getting it. Doing so added nearly 3 hours to the battery life of the computer. It also made it feel noticeably faster when plugged in.
There’s your problem you bought a Dell comes with unnecessary junk and low specs so o begin with not a good combo
@@samanthagriffinv2.08 How old are you, 12?
bloat is noticable on a low end "budget" desktop as well
@@ahar1401 I’m not saying it’s isn’t trust me I used plenty of low low end hardware before. I’m just saying Dell hp and then but dell especially is a bad contender to it. Cuz they put low hardware stuff that would barely meet Windows minimum hardware requirements and load it it with junk like McCafee and norten and a bunch of other junk. That’s why it’s better when you get a new pc from anyone like hp or Dell or whatever company just delete every partition on the drive and reinstall windows.
Could you please show me which steps did you follow? I need more battery and performance hehe, or at least less temp.
Linus has become the tech equivalent of ATHLEAN-X where everything is killing your FPS instead of your gains
LOL
LMAOOO
Yes i did not expect to see someone here who watches him
I read the title in Athlean X's voice and was looking for this comment
They even look a lot
I discover that I'm using almost 15 GB out of 16 GB Ram without even playing game, just using Firefox, Google Chrome and few other things. I'm using over 90% of my ram without playing a game, no wonder I have stuttering and freezing while I play games.
This is why I've been watching channels like this since I was like 13, I'm not the smartest tech guy, but I've learned quite a bit from passively watching.
Bro that's kinda serious. Which programs take you more memory?
It’s time for a fresh install at the very least nothing running on startup.
why would you use two different web browsers at the same time? lol
how, lol. I currently have Wallpaper Engine, Steam, Discord, Spotify and some other programs running as well as 20 YT tabs, several of them 4K, am downloading a Steam game while watching this 4K video, and I'm using 13GB
You should test this on a more middle tier hardware, not so many people have a 3080 or an i7, more like a 1660 super and an i5 - r5
yep that'd be perfect because if the difference is much greater, it means my 2 core cpu is getting killed HARD.
I have a ryzen 5500 and Vega graphics lmao
i have a 1070ti and a i7 and yet i had a 1050ti with a i5 once. but if you say so.
I have an i3 and no graphics card
What are you, a low spec gamer subscriber?
Linus, this REALLY should have been done with completely AVERAGE hardware - most people don't have 6-12 cores, most people don't have a 30-series RTX card, most people don't have 3200mhz RAM, most people ... the list goes on. A lot of us would much prefer a video about reducing bloatware on the "steam average computer", and speeding up crap on older laptops/machines!
Well a mid tier new system would either be 4/8 or 6/12 core/threads and 3200mhz ram is now common with new builds. And if the gpus were available a 3060 would be plausible.
yea you abolsutely right, but hey, say thanks he did that test with a 11700K instead of a 5900x... because I can tell you with the 5900x the differences are even less significant than the actual showcased results of this test.
i did a similar test back on last year after the 5900x was released and I got it myself (paired with a 3080 and 64 gb of 3600mhz cl16 ram), and the differences never go above 2% with the mentioned cpu. And no matter the amount of junk you run at background.
Thx for the warning so I don't have to waste my time on the video
Windows task manager showed the memory running at 2133 mhz, which means their uber fast 3600 cl14 ram did not have the xmp profile loaded anyway
What kind of pleb does not have 6 cores. lol
I’m just laughing at the comments absolutely ripping Linus apart 😂 love your content Linus
I can't even tell when my fps drops because it's always under 50
hi
Linus being a FAILURE (in asian accent)
Fancy seeing you here.
Hello, also your videos are hilarious
CC Cleaner and McAfee should be included in the thumbnail they slow down your PC a lot more than they help, and so can be said about many other cleaning software or AVs...
@@choppings54 absolutely, these softwares mostly make it worse.
But what if you're stupid? What's the best compromise between performance usage and protection?
I'd go for a paid MalwareBytes personally (even though I don't use anything)
@choppings54 Think of the innocent mac users!
@@iluvpandas2755 Well they're kinda ignorant, you gotta be to buy a T2 chip / Apple Silicon Mac.
You gotta not know about Apple's unethical engineering, how they are building so that a consumable part's death bricks multi thousand dollars machine...
the best cleanup tool are: windows clenup and removing unnecessary and big files..
@@techgregory5253 best tool is your brain lol
Much better than any bloatware you could install
"What's Windows Explorer doing? I don't even have it open!"
Would've thought Linus knew that explorer is the shell. It runs the Taskbar and Start menu among other things. Not just when you open folders 🤔
but then you'd have to finally face the reality that windows is still running the nt kernel and is just prettifying explorer every version
I mean I don't know if this is normal or still a thing, but when i force closed it using task manager by task bar vanished until I restarted lol
@@kingoftherevolution4855 it's normal :)
its like finder on Mac
right? i knew this as a kid. i thought the same as him and closed it and saw the taskbar dissapear
What I've found is that percent CPU usage and percent memory are basically irrelevant; It's some complicated crap involving branch prediction, or core handoffs, or hard drive access, or audio processing priority offloading, or particle effects queuing up in the GPU, or shifting disk caches, something that doesn't show up on task manager, that causes EXTENSIVE micro-stutter and macro-stutter when trying to multitask. "Why did the whole render just freeze for 1/2 second?" "Why does this only happen when a browser is open?" "Why can I run the game fine at 80fps right up until a pitched battle when there are frames that cost several seconds to render?"
Same, recently noticed that hardware acceleration in discord was behind micro stutter in valorant.
You just accurately described what we all think or wonder or don't know how to put into words. "My benchmarks are all fine but something is WRONG!" Nicely put.
Exactly, they should use perfmon instead of tskmgr
This. Absolutely this. Unless you're seriously into the IT field, diagnosing a performance problem is way more complicated and unpredictable than most think.
Just read "Modern Operating Systems' by A. Tannenbaum and you'll have all your answers there.
Basically it's all about IRQs. You access disk data via IRQ, you communicate with the GPU via IRQ. Your keyboard is causing IRQs.
Basically anything to do with talking to other components means IRQ.
"Bloat is killing your FPS" - "no noticeable difference"
Why, Linus? It doesn't have to be like that.
It does though. Clickbait is the game.
1
@@ryno4ever433 Like if they needed to clickbait anymore at this point of popularity
Bloat on average kills 4 frames🙂
@@ryno4ever433 it causes people to not watch important videos
5:20 it says windows explorer but it's actually just explorer. It contains the desktop, taskbar including the programs on them and that is why it has the restart option instead of end task. It gives you the option to restart it if it glitched. In older versions you could end explorer and you would just have a black screen with all the program windows that were not minimized on screen, without the taskbar it is much harder to get access to minimized windows. If cmd was open you could start it back up by typing explorer
You can still kill it in CMD though. I do not recommend. You literally lose all screen function.
Just like Linus mentioned, I would LOVE to see how much having a "dirty" pc would affect gaming performance if that PC was actually a really low end one.
I am running a dual core CPU, 12 Gb of RAM DDR3, an HDD with no SSD, and on board graphics. Small difference could REALLY matter. I would like to see just how much it would actually make a difference.
It'd make a significant one. You'd be running the same software with half (or quarter? Idk 11700K specs) of the cores.
For example, if I saw 5% background usage on my 5900X, I'd expect some process to have bugged out or an update to be running. Whereas on a dual core with the same per core performance, that could be 25-30%. That'd for sure be a bigger performance hog.
Bruh if nothing else, you should really get a cheap SSD. Your life would be so much better.
@@oldbot64 Cheap SSD's aren't a thing depending on the country. And the ones you do find have no DRAM cache, which you can guess goes as fast as a 7200RPM Hard Drive
@@polytelus umm yeah u can get SSDs in 2 forms- Nvme and Sata. U can guess which is faster.
@@polytelus my bad... I misunderstood ur comment. What do you mean cheap SSDs arent a thing lol... 240/480Gb SATA SSDs are very cheap. Less than 80 dollars. They have R/WR speeds that are at the very minimum 3-4 times faster than HDDs. That will be such a big improvement in performance for OP who is still using a HDD.
"If we had been running 8 gigs of RAM and a quad core CPU, we might have seen very different results"
Me who just bought an i7 1165g7 quad core and 8gb ram last month: *Why must you hurt me this way*
Same bro I bought that too in September
my laptop has 2 cores and 12 gigs, tbh it runs Minecraft alright so idc too much
@@someonerandom704 minecraft is a light game
@@someonerandom704 Can't a potato run minecraft?
@@criptin4075 yes but the game is still horribly optimized. It's basically completely reliant on single core performance, so even if you have some uber fancy graphics card, not much will change.
You should have tested it on weaker machines as well, since those are the ones who will be most affected.
25% of people are using 8GB of RAM and 5% are using 4GB.
While not majority, its still a significant number of people.
i did, i have a 8GB laptop, GTX950M, i5, on a fresh install of windows after switching from Linux, i installed BF4, it played so smooth i thought it wasn't the same laptop
good point
No, 2gb is where it's at
Using Different CPU would have matter much... and not a recent one. They should try back with other CPU / RAM config much alike i5 9th w16GB.
@@therandomguy1701 Open a single Electron app and those 2 gigs are gone, lol.
0:57 Is there a BURP at the end of the jingle ?!?! 🤔
windows too fat
@@Persvicxisn't windows ntfs? 🤓
@@mrnecroticwell u got me lol
I would looooove to see a video of these tests on a 4 core 8gig ram setup. And, me being picky, id have liked to see these tests done on 1080p and 1440p to really show numerical differences in performance, just cuz a lot of people still run 1080p. And cuz id wanna be sure its actually a bigger difference 🤣
I think you're just talking about your specific setup
@@Mainancepatsaji I'd actually like to see something similar as well. 1080p is still the dominate gaming resolution, and ~54% of gamers have ram amounts other than 16 gb. I'd like to see lower increments tested.
Yeah 1080p 240hz ftw
Vote UP!!!
"Steam" is supposed to know what the average computer specifications are.
6:56 I am confused.
Linus: "With the render taking an additional 14 seconds"
Clean: 7:15, Dirty: 7:23 - that difference is 8 seconds, that's almost half of what you just said.
EDIT: Linus probably only had either his script or the numbers from the graph; can't really blame him, was just something funny that stood out to me.
Probably one of the scriptwriters got that one wrong by looking at something different that was cut from the video. (Atleast that is what i'd guess)
Linus math tips
He is quite mornic most times and infact he exagerates EVERYTHING just to be relivent.
@@alorrick7546 Who cares if you don’t like him don’t watch him.
I was gonna comment same thing. 8s and 14s is a 43% difference which is significant, I guess.
Pro tip: Separate user accounts for gaming and general use. It won't stop ALL of the background services from installed bloat, but you can more finely tune what's installed system-wide versus per-user, so you can have the best of both worlds, mostly
True
Honestly I don't understand this comment can somebody explain it? I mean even if I separate by users I still need to use my razer synapse to have my dpi, polling rate in each user, etc. I also need to record my gameplay in the gaming user and I suppose since it's on the gaming user I need to have DaVinci in the gaming users. Same with my fans speed etc
Better yet just don't let all that garbage auto run, just use it when needed and kill it when done, making this much harder than it needs to be
@@elliotdeclet594 You didn't answer anything he was asking. He was asking what the separation of users does for performance when all of the bloat he could technically stop while gaming is needed in his use case. A separate user won't make the recording software less ram or cpu intensive just like anything controlling fan speeds.
And yes, having no onboard memory on a mouse may be bad design but it apparently is what he has now.
This is like me asking "How do I optimize X" and you answer "Just buy new X lol".
@@Slyfa187 then why dont you answer the question yourself and add your own advice instead of just criticizing my answer 🤨
Its just something to keep in mind when shopping for gaming accessories next time or something someone else can see and and keep in mind when buying accessories, could also take that advice and apply it to fan speeds, shouldnt set your fan curve in software but in bios
Your comment is ultimately less helpful than mine
I have a high end pc. I have my chrome open with a lot of tabs, launchers (steam, epic, etc), AV, recording software, live wallpaper (wallpaper engine) chat apps like discord. All of this stuff and I don’t see any drop in performance.
This works on a low end pc but high end, don’t even worry about it
Read it as BLOAT is killing hour gains lol. AthleanX in a nutshell
We need a crossover episode. Have Linus check his muscle imbalances
@@iomaelstrom5681 Yeees. Let Linus take over for Jesse for an episode lol
Yes lol
hahaha yes I thought about this too
Same🤣🤣
"I don't even have windows explorer running"
I guess the taskbar and desktop went to get milk then.
😂😂😂😂
The best part is "what is explorer doing"
Man, that ruined my trust on Linus tech wisdom.
reminds me of back when I killed the task. fortunately it restarts itself after a while
Tails what are you planning on that bench
Before the updated Age of Empires II having explorer.exe running would mess with the ground textures in Windows 7. I have task killed explorer.exe on computers I tried fixing that were extremely slow.
7:25 The important thing here is 1% lows, not really the average, and there is a 7% difference on CSGO, that's pretty huge.
Plus 5% on both F1 and Hitman(Dartmoor) and 6% on Hitman(Dubai).
Yes, this should have been pointed out.
A huge oversight by Linus. I made a post about this!
Yes, this. And I think if their setup was on hdds the difference in the 1% and 0.1% lows would be greater.
5:20
Linus-what is windows explorer doing
Me-BRO THE TASKBAR AND DESKTOP IS LITERALLY A PART OF WINDOWS EXPLORER!!
"If we had been running 8 gigs of RAM and a quad core CPU, we might have seen very different results"
Thats nothing, use an HDD as the windows driver.
My backup HDD was failing and it would basically make windows die slowly while it was plugged in, was a real headache to backup things from it to a new one 😅🤦🏻
Who the heck uses an HDD as a boot drive in 2021? SSDs have been standard for almost 10 years now.
@@bender9000 capacity on the cheap. They also hold data for years when not powered
@@bender9000 Well... I do! And it is not THAT bad. Aside from boot times, it is not slow.
@@bender9000 keep throwing hundreds of dollars at your computer so windows takes 10s less to start... I'll keep my $$ and just let my computer run...
7:00 We saw a "14 seconds" difference... Linus, isn't 23 - 15 = 8 second difference?
thank you, i knew i wasn't the only one
Script writer was drunk, accidents happen. Party on 🥳
yes, and that would mean a 1.83% difference instead of the 3.21% they miscalculated
Came here to say this!
Me with a bare minimum pc: "You merely adopted force closing, I was born in it, moulded by it"
@RASEL.. 💋 its No Nut November, sweetheart.
Yeah that was me using my windows vista laptop until a couple years ago
@RASEL.. 💋 Not this month Satan
I would really like to see a quad core 8gb test since those are the only people who 5 or 6 fps would actually make a difference to
Instead of terminating the actual processes for them to just start back up again, you should be stopping the service in the services tab.
msconfig too
Indeed .. the taskbar icon is nothing more then that.. an icon to show that it is running… reason why a ton of spyware/malware/root kits don’t even have any icons that can be shown.
This man Windows’
@@angru04 I can't believe that msconfig is still in windows... just checked and IT IS. ver win 8.1 pro (free with 3 hour buy me popup)
I found it weird that they didn't know that.
Would’ve been more interesting if this was done on a low spec pc that has less capacity
Watch Gamers Nexus pre-build test videos. They are doing benchmarks with and without preinstalled bloatware. And in some cases the difference is noticeable.
I'd bet the majority of LTT viewers a have sub-$1000 PC.
@@Ascend777 yeh I do too but I think it’s clear that there would be no effects on a pc like this
Yep. And he will never touch the subject again. Classic LTT!
Would be interesting to see exactly how much hardware specs matter in this scenario. Because while the tested hardware saw a 3% drop in performance, what about low end hardware? The hit in performance could be much greater and thus the conclusion could be more serious than "it's okay".
Also, I was expecting the dirty install to be cleaned by uninstalling stuff to see if that would help recover some of the lost performance.
Also also, nothing was said about the fact that the two SSDs could have different performance scores and it would have been nice to see how they compare, just to make this test more robust to criticism.
Using Linux has made me appreciate resource usage so much more.
yes but compatibility on linux is an absolute nightmare
@@chewy_chip756 Ehh not really. With Proton and dxvk, compatibility is very good. Wouldn't call it a nightmare.
This video is what happens when you're only exposed to high end stuff. Feels very much like the out of touch rich guy trying to give advice to a homeless guy. Why even test this on what most would consider a god tier setup?
Because everyone already knows how bloat cripples lower end systems.
What this video is for, is for the highest echelon of gaming. When you have the best performance that money can buy, does it stand reason to be anal retentive with bloat?
Same reason why gaming benchmarks are done with high end gpu's. No one gives a rat ass about your 'homeless guy' gpu.
Sucks, but thats the reality of it.
My 6600k and gtx 1060 agree. I go cry now.
@@tim9605 actualy it depends on what kind of service it is and what kind of init system it uses, its a bit more complicated.
@@empty3102 well its a show first of all and it shows you that if it can tank the perf of a high end machine like this then you can expect few times harder problems.
@@tim9605 then i guess you dont know what you are talking about, services.msc just shows services registered as windows services but i can in 5 minutes make you a program that starts you services without ever registering them as windows services. and then fork from that program effectivly bypassing windows services or utilizing them on a minimal level.
I would love to see how this performs with VR gaming. I've noticed that bloat seems to cause lots of microstutters in VR games, even simple ones like Beat Saber, while a clean PC install is a lot less jerky and nauseating.
RGB/peripheral software is usually the culprit. People have made batch files that kill programs known to cause issues so you can just run one of those before you play.
But they wouldn't have a video with this solution so !!!
0:10 Ah yes, downloading games is killing my FPS
Can’t have weak performance if you never play anything
Underrated comment!
I cleaned everything out of my computer, including the motherboard and PSU, and now I get infinite FPS on Black Screen Simulator 2021.
@@TheRogueWolf same, I love that game
technically the truth
"I'm disappointed in myself, my family" lmao don't be disappointed in your family bro lmao that's funny as hell.
I feel like testing it with a quad core would have made for a more interesting video. I liked the testing setup, but just trying the high end system feels incomplete.
or atleast a ryzen 3700x or even a 3600 purely because a lot of people upgraded to 3rd gen and didnt upgrade to the latest one
One thing to note when it comes to trying to manually clean up auto-start applications, it's useful to look at the services that are set to automatically restart when they are turned off. Some things that are set to start at startup will run background services indefinitely, even if you've closed the main application.
I just posted about his memory, lol. Linus knows better,,, he's getting old, HA! ... I got about 30yrs+ on him lol, and I remember.
@@TheeRocker what is it with old people and placing commas and dots in the strangest ways
@@ziwuri smartass lol... 3 coma's shows 'to be continued',,, as 3 periods show etc... basic English. I also don't care about typo's lol.
@@ziwuri i think you mean: "whats with old people using punctuation correctly?"
@@FirstLast-ge4yd They are in no way using punctuation correctly. They used three (3) commas in a row and 3 full stops for no reason with 2 spaces after them.
aww man I thought you would go way more in depth with this
It would have been nice to see frametime consistency measured to see if bloat affects stuttering imo.
They're no digital foundry
It would have been nice for them to find a consumer friendly fix for this
They don't go in depth with anything. They have a hypothesis, do the minimum "tests" to find a conclusion then script it to be ~10 minutes. If you want real testing, there's better channels for that.
This is the casuals tech channel, what did you expect?
Tech tip: You can also just use the delete key to end tasks in Task Manager
When first started PC gaming, didn't have the room on the HDD to store crap, didn't have the horses to run crap. So kept it clean. Even though now have a Ryzen 3600X, 16GB of ram, 1TB SSD, etc... I keep it clean. Old habit I guess ;)
That how I remember my mom keeping our home computer 👍
My current setup is a 1tb ssd with a few games on it.
Got a 2tb hdd for basic games and other programs.
Keep that ssd clean asf
Linus, Amazon has motherboards for sale as “used-good” through “used- like new” they claim that these motherboards have “slight cosmetic damage/missing extras” which I find very strange. They are significantly cheaper than the new products and are sold via amazon themselves from their warehouse. A lot of people on a budget could use the knowledge of you guys testing out these products to see exactly what they mean by the conditions to see if its worth saving money there.
good video idea
from what i have seen is that usualy they sell the board only with no parts or manuals or extras what so ever, which includes io shield and cables you might need and otherwise not get from other parts such as sata cables etc
these are basicly returns that are tested but might not have other stuff like screws and such or might have been dropped and have a scratch or something like that basicly not a problem
@@ModrunOfficial i assumed by the “missing extras” they meant: “You get the board only and nothing else” but still i think itd be interesting to see what they could possibly interpret as acceptable “good” level damage to a board without it interfering with the performance of the board, threatening the lifespan of the board, or potentially becoming a fire hazard in conditions that are not absolutely optimal for the boards health (ex: in a cheap case with not so great airflow)
They're probably just second-hand boards. They could have some scratches from being removed, but you also have to watch out for damaged pins or slots.
Hey Linus! I was the random guy in the gray coat that just said hi! Unfortunately COVID sucks but that made my week regardless! Keep it up everyone at LMG thanks for all the videos you do. I’ll apply for a job when I graduate!
One thing I've found is icons on the desktop can slow things down. More so for cheap laptops and systems older than like 8 years.
I'd be interested to see a "Dirty PC but with the bloat uninstalled" rather than just closing stuff to see if there's still an impact or if a fresh install is the only way to go.
Exactly just closing this crap isn't going to work, it just turns it self back on. however winaero looks good reading up on it now...
@@josephschultz4097 stop and disable the service will stop things from restarting, would have been good to see what difference it would have made. Still interesting that they still noticed some improvement over the video though
@@pixlhound Hmm not sure if I can I'll check tomorrow after work, as putting in 11-12 hour days with extra 3 hours on top for driving to and from work. thanks I didn't even think about that option
Linus: Bloat is killing your FPS
Jeff Cavalier: Bloat is killing your gains!
Would love to see this test done again 4 gigs of ram and with 8 gigs of ram to be able to benchmark the difference between clean and dirty on different ram options. Even smaller processors. 4 core, 6 core, 8 core. I love that you did this test, But since your computers are made super powerful specifically to maintain high performance with programs running, we can barely see the difference.
Btw, i love your channel and what you do. Thanks for the good content.
That’s right, smaller setups will have a big difference.
Is like turning on the A/C on a 5.0 Mustang and turning on the A/C in the 1.0L 3 cylinder VW Up, is not te same when you have lots of power.
This is especially important for older and weaker PCs that don't have as much playroom regarding CPU and memory usage
Quick tip: You can select a task and click DEL to close the app instead of right clicking and clicking on "End Task" every time
I’d love to see a comparison with a lower speck machine. I’m capping mine out every time I run a game, so it would be known if it would be better with less bloat.
Of course it would be better with no bloat. I always do a fresh install and then spend some time disabling or removing Windows built-in bloatware and data collecting stuff. Decrapify your Windows, man!
This test will be much more useful with the “avarage gaming machine” for a simple thing, it Is much more noticable a 15 hp loss in a Ferrari or in a Fiat Panda?
would love to see this revisited with 12th gen with its P and E cores
The real test is if uninstalling the bloat recovers your performance
That would've been a decent control test to exclude the possibility of the differences being due to silicon quality
Microsoft really needs to introduce an 'END TASK and BLOCK until next startup' option. I have experienced so many apps that force restart when you end task, I hate it.
"Maybe that's a good experiment for another day," says the most successful PC tech RUclipsr who can easily do said experiment...
TL;DR: It doesn't really matter if your system have the ressources to handle the background apps and your game. And it will probably matter if you're tight on specs.
quick tip:
If dragging windows around feels laggy and sometimes pressing on network icon and it get stuck scanning for shares. Open Task Manager locate "Windows Explorer"
right click and select "restart" all your windows will disappear for a while and it will get reloaded to the memory. Is like rebooting windows without rebooting it.
I do this sometimes, great tip
Win10 is so unstable that if I'm browsing folders full of mixed media that it will kill itself every hour or so without my input.
@@mastafull What specs do you have? Or might be a storage problem. I have a lot of stuff saved on my PC and I just put almost everything in the same place and never had that type of stuff happen, only a couple long loading times and once frozen for a second. Especially when looking at my hard drives.
Did he just say "Buy more RAM" in terms of downloading RAM?
I pirate my RAM when I download it!
My ram is homebrew
That "dirty" drive was also a fresh windows with just some programs installed, or it was used for a year at least? Because in my eyes if it wasnt used for over some time, that slill counts as a clean windows, and the performance drop should be definetly more noticalbe at least in boot up and in program openings. I''m not sure about the fps, but 2-5 fps drop is nothing. But in the every day usage you should notice it's definitely slower with the junk you've collected in the past few months/years.
They should have installed and ran all of the programs multiple times. Idk whether they did or not.
This is so true, if you've uninstalled (or sometimes just updated) a bunch of programs, they'll leave all kinds of junk.
My startup times had gotten annoyingly bad (I feel so spoiled after all those years of waiting several minutes for windows xp to load on crappy laptops) but after a quick hit of the registry with CCleaner (some people don't like/trust this program, but it's never let me down so I don't give a...) and my boot times were back to good, but not clean install levels.
Probably worth noting I have Windows fast startup disabled (because it caused issues with my crappy wacom drivers.) So startup time changes may be less noticable to others.
@@derptyderp5287 CCLeaner has the big benefit of not being Malware like most cleaners, so you could always do worse lol. I don't happen to use it anymore, but it isn't a killer like other cleaning programs
Win10 isnt that bad anymore with filling itself with junk like Win7 or fuckin XP i had to reinstall every 1-2 years.
@@mrn234 win10 is just as bad if not worse with semi annual updates that function like inplace upgrades.
Just fixed frame drop by turning off Xbox Overlay capturing. Windows + G > Gear icon (Settings) > Capturing > Uncheck both boxes
"I just clicked all of the boxes on Ninite" Legitimately thought that makes your computer implode
Yes that is certainly something you can feel, "just sitting at the machine".
Opening, closing and loading in different environments will be more clunky, jittery etc.
Just depends if your going from clean to dirty or from dirty to clean if you feel the difference.
If i dont "clean" my os and make it run smooth, then i can always feel some interference, in games, browsing, opening and closing apps etc.
[Re : commented]
I remember first time buying a Dell laptop on a store
It didn't look like it was horribly garbage
Until I bought it and checked the task manager
The first thing I said was
"Bruh"
Computer manufacturers wants to rob as much performance out of your machine by including as much bloatware as legally possible. Change my mind.
But that's what you get. If you're even remotely competent with computers, do a fresh install and remove all the bloatware yourself. Sure takes time and effort but at least no more junk inside.
@@MCAlexisYT Yeah it's something they do to people who don't have as much knowledge about computers, and trick them into paying more for less, the intel cpu's in laptops sound amazing until you look at the actual specs. core i7 with only 4 cores.
5:20 Your Desktop and taskbar are also part of the explorer so you don't necessarily need to have it open just for it to suck some resources
Me with Chrome and Brave each running 50 tabs: Sounds believeable.
You guys ought to have run this on a modest gamer PC too.
Would like to see this test on a laptop instead. Preferably with a dual core-quad core config cpu and atleast a 1050ti mobile gpu with 8GB of ram.
i mean... a laptop is still just a computer, the same as any other. the form factor is a bit different, but the general end results wouldn't really be any different.
@@tzxazrael i just said laptops because they are mostly the ones that have bloatware installed.
@@ikunaruLIVE yea... but my point was, it would just be repeating the video. the results would be the same. having "a bunch of software" running in the background, whatever the programs are and whatever the system is... is going to have a small-but-notable impact on system performance... even if it's "good" stuff like antivirus/ antispyware, etc.
@@tzxazrael yes but that effect mostly matters on system that are lower spec than what is showed on the video. System resources, specially on lower end hardware are what matters because not a lot of people here, (imo) doesn't have the spec showed in the video. And why just stop at laptops? Just try out any spec PC from lower to high end to show how much it really matters to make the test more valuable.
Single channel ram to be sure.
Been sitting on a comp all day every day for 30 years. Never had any doubt that a fresh win install made everything faster. Though it is getting more difficult to tell these days.
CTT (Chris Tech Tips) -- In Task Manager: You can left-click the process, then press ALT+E to "end task" instead of right-click to open context menu, then left-click to select "end task" (saves about one second per process) :)
when you force close applications, they can often restart themselves, causing a greater drag on the pc for a while. Windows sucks for actually closing programs
It actually doesn't if you're remotely competent at using software or reading words. Literally a few tabs over in task manager, there's a tab titled "services"
@@flyingtentacle7631 yeah the 63 people who liked my comment are all incompetent. durrr
Personally having clean system and playing games that use near 100% cpu/gpu, even communication program makes a noticeable difference. I see and feel big difference between TS3 and DC
I miss the good old time when everyone was using ts3
hey linus 5:21 explorer is a part of the ui (operates as) (pretty much just the taskbar) thats why it operates in the bg hope you read this and find out smth new!
Should talk about Denuvo, VM Protect, etc too.
My brain when reading the title:
BLOAT IS KILLING YOUR GAINS
Ok Jeff
Facepulls' your PC
6:57 ahh yes the 14sec difference. Did some quick math there, huh
This is why i use linux, they are getting 2.2 with a debloated windows machine while im here getting 200 megs with void and dwm.
@Todd Nosferatu That is true, except with native linux games.
according to Linus the existence of my pc is killing my fps
If you don't have a pc you have immeasurable fps.
No dude,, if you look at the real life it also lags much. Everything is 24fps.
@@SupremeMasterr That's just your brain processing the information that your senses take in.
"I heard zoomers are super into... multitasking" Literally watching this on my second monitor while working
me too, whilst being older than Linus
Second monitor? That's a waste of electricity. Just run a 4k display so you can have several 1080p windows open.
While pretending to be working, you mean? I can't even read an article and listen to music at the same time without losing focus and comprehension.
You should consider separating the two, and then maybe you'll finish work sooner and have more free time as well? I guess it depends on the work, though...
@@Varangian_af_Scaniae Or I can have seperate monitors and turn to a full screen video...
so what you're telling me is, all the mandatory always-on applications that every gaming publisher seems hellbent on foisting on everybody, are killing the performance of their own games, regardless of the hardware they're installed on.... 👌
Lol, yep, 100%.
The thing is though, those probably aren't the major contributors actually. The Corsair and Anti-Malware stuff would be the heavy-hitters here, and Linus wasn't even stopping services. That's probably why the FPS actually going down on the last test happened, because services were starting processes back up in the background when they started after terminating, instead of running in more of a steady-state.
Obviously it would also depend heavily on whether other launchers are updating games while you're running a different game under a different launcher. I'd imagine some will go ahead and update which could add a lot of network, disk, and some CPU activity for decompression. Some launchers probably detect if you're running a game even when not under their launcher, like if you're in exclusive fullscreen mode, but I definitely won't give them the benefit of the doubt on that.
Ironically if they ran anything more graphically demanding, they would have seen much closer to 1% difference since the game would likely bottleneck on GPU, which isn't serving background processes.
Therefore this stuff is hardly "killing" performance--it really depends on whether it's eating into bottlenecked resources--therefore your mileage WILL vary by game, hardware, and background process. And when you throw a multitude of different applications at it, it's hard to draw quantifiable conclusions about particular background processes are the worst unless you (correctly) terminate things one-by-one to determine what is making the biggest difference. This isn't a Gamers Nexus video so obviously it's not going to go that far. Still, when you sort by CPU, in Task Manager details, that gives you a good finger-in-the-wind as to what is going to be the most impactful.
can you make a video that shows whether or not dual monitors affect FPS in game, and how different it is with just a single monitor (if that video hasn't already been done)