How To Configure Windows 10 For Gaming.

today I'm going to show you how I set up a gaming system on Windows 10 stay tuned so it's been a while since I did a video on setting up a gaming system in fact I looked through my catalog and the last video I did on this topic was in 2021 that's before I even had a place to film these videos and I was still doing videos in my dining room table so I figured it's about time for an update but I'm going to do things a little bit differently than I did before in this video we're going to be setting up a Windows 10 system for gaming then next week I'm going to set up a Windows 11 system for gaming then I'm going to follow that up by putting both systems head-to-head and answer the question of whether or not Windows 10 is still better for gaming in 2023 but before we get started I got to pay some bills so check out today's sponsor is your copy of Windows 10 unactivated well it it doesn't have to be because with today's sponsor vipd key you can get a valid Windows 10 license for under $20 stop dealing with that stupid watermark on the desktop the valid license for Windows 10 also with an activated copy of Windows 10 you can upgrade to Windows 11 for free just go to the link in the description below and pick up a valid Windows 10 license key during checkout use the code cyber CPU for a 25% discount once you have your key go to your activation settings in Windows 10 and cck click on the link that says change product key enter the product key you just purchased and hit activate now you don't have to deal with that stupid Watermark that come with running an unactivated copy of Windows 10 now on with the video so let's stop wasting time and jump on the system and I'll show you how I optimize Windows 10 for gaming all right so here we are in a fairly default install of Windows 10 and I'm going to go through and show you some of the settings that I change when I'm setting up a gaming system so the first one and this one I typically do this one first just because if you don't do it first you're going to end up forgetting it eventually but that's check your monitor's refresh rate if you right click on your desktop go down to display settings and then from display settings you just scroll down to where it says Advanced display settings and then from there your refresh rate should be listed right here my monitor is 144 htz but set it to the highest number that your monitor will allow you to set it to typically by default it usually comes at 59.9 or 60 HZ and then once you change it it will actually ask you if you want to keep the settings go ahead and say keep settings now I obviously set it down to 60 but you want to keep it to the highest setting that you have available on your system which in my case is 144 hit keep changes and there we go now here's the thing with refresh rate it doesn't really affect gaming performance at all in fact the games are going to run at whatever they're going to run regardless of what your refresh rate on your monitor is set at but the point of a gaming system is to kind of have fun playing games right so why not take advantage of whatever refresh rate you can get out of your monitor for your own usability and your own experience because 144 HZ is a lot better than 60 on a monitor trust me it really is let's get back to it okay so since we're in settings the next thing that we're going to do is I'm going to go ahead and click the home button here and then we're going to want to go into our system settings and then from system settings we want to slow scroll down until we find power and sleep now in power and sleep what we're going to be doing is we're going to be changing the performance mode that the system runs at typically by default it just sits right here in the middle however I want you to scroll down and go until you find additional power settings right here and this is going to open the old control panel version now this one yours probably isn't going to have all of these different settings right here but what we're going to choose is we're going to choose high performance if you don't have a high performance one available then all you have to do is hit create power plan and then choose high performance from this list name it whatever you want and then go through the prompts but on mine we're just going to go ahead and click on high performance and then we're going to go ahead and close this window right here once we do that and then for good measure we can always take this slider right here and slide it Forward also now the next setting I'm going to show you is one that I've actually just found recently so what we're going to want to do is go ahead and close this click on your start button and type in task scheduler and then open your task scheduler up and what I've noticed lately is I've noticed that in a lot of system especially my system is Windows Defender is using a lot of hard drive usage and I've got an SSD and that SSD is getting beat on quite a bit especially when downloading games from Steam and things of that nature so one thing that I would recommend is changing the way that Windows Defender works when it's scanning different files and stuff like that let me show you how to do that so from task scheduler go ahead and open up your task Library go into Microsoft then you want to want to go into windows and then from Windows you want to scroll down until you find Windows Defender so it's should all be alphabetical so if you scroll down find Windows Defender you're going to have these four settings right here so we can move this over so you can kind of see these are especially the scheduled scan is the one we really want to pay attention to but I would go ahead and go through all of these right here but if you double click on the scheduled scan right here and then go into the conditions Tab and then right here it says start the task only if the computer is idle and then you can go ahead and leave it default that's fine and then make sure that it's also checked to stop if the computer ceases to be idle and then go ahead and hit okay and then I would change that for all of these right here you can essentially go through make sure these two top boxes are clicked and do this for all the different tasks that Windows Defender is doing and then once we get through here there you go now essentially what this is going to do is this is going to make Windows Defender only do anything when your system is at idle so any kind of scheduled tasks or anything that Windows Defender wants to do it's going to wait until the system's idle before it does it and I found that this really helps when it comes to the dis usage that Windows Defender uses on a normal basis now it's not going to do anything about your real-time scans so still when you're downloading files it's still going to check them as it downloads them however in your regular scheduled scans it won't do those right in the middle of playing a game like when you really don't want it to so let's get back to it okay since we're in task scheduler there's a couple other things that I want to do so go ahead and scroll up right here and we want to find application experience and it's going to be right here and this is all going to be in alphabetical order and essentially what you want to do is go through with all of these different tasks right here and disable all of them so go ahead and click disable disable and it's fairly easy just go through the list and disable all of these tasks and essentially all this is is Windows Telemetry it's not going to affect your computer at all other than make it a little bit quicker and then the next thing I want you to do is go down to where it says customer experience Improvement program and then disable these tasks as well and then once you get through that we can move on to the next step and that next step is going to be Services since we're disabling stuff and all so we're going to go ahead and close task scheduler we're going to click on the start menu and type in services and then from Services we want to go through and I typically like to use the standard tab but you can use the extended tab if you want but if you from the standard tab you want to go through and the first one that I typically disable is connected user experience and telemetry and if we scroll down here should all be in alphabetical order so there it is right there double click on it we're going to change from automatic to disabled and then push stop and then at this point you can go ahead and hit okay we can move on to the next one and the next one that I'm going to choose is system main and this one essentially really has no purpose other than if you're running spinning discs but what it does is it preloads applications at system boot up and applications that Windows thinks that you might want to to use and it doesn't do anything if you have an SSD installed anyway so if you have an SSD as your primary drive system M really does nothing it only works if you have a spinning disc as your primary drive and honestly you really should have an SSD as your primary drive in a gaming system for sure so I'm going to go ahead and double click and we're going to set this to disabled push the stop button and then push okay and then move on to the next one and the next one that I'm going to choose is Windows search now this one right here is kind kind of an optional one and it's not necessarily one that I would recommend that everybody disable and here's the thing with Windows search is it does take up hard drive usage it does take up resources even if you have an SSD it's still taking up resources that you could be using for other things on your system however if you plan to search for documents on a regular basis or if you plan on using file history as a backup for your system then you can't disable Windows search however the indexing essentially all search does is index all your files all the time so that way when you go to search for something it already has an index of all your files set up that's one of the reasons why I recommend disabling it because all of that indexing takes resources that could be used for other things so if you don't have any plans on using search or if you're not using file history for a backup and this is just a dedicated gaming system then I would shut it off but that's going to be your call let's get back to it okay so to turn off Windows search same thing you just go to disable you hit stop and then once it stops you go ahead and hit okay and then the last service that I want to look at is all of these Xbox Services right here now this is going to be another one that is kind of optional if you're using these Xbox Services then obviously don't disable them but if you're not using anything related to Xbox then there's no reason why you can't turn these off now these are typically manually triggered anyway so it really doesn't matter if you disable them if you're not using them it's probably not going to make that much of a difference cuz as you can see these Services have all been stopped before I disabled them anyway so they're not actually taking up resources however whatever it does that manually triggers them I don't want it to trigger while I'm in a game so since I'm not using them I go ahead and turn them off and then at this point we can go ahead and close Services because those are all the ones that I'd recommend disabling for right now and then the next thing I want to talk about is different applications that you should install on a gaming system now obviously everybody is going to have steam installed because you know it's steam you're going to need whatever applications that you use in order to run whatever games and stuff like that that you plan on running now it could be steam it could be the Epic store there's different stores that you're going to be using and go ahead and install those on your system but that's kind of an obvious one the ones that aren't so obvious are ones that I'm going to recommend right now and those are these three programs right here it's After Burner it's Envy clean install as well as a program called heaven which this is essentially just a benchmark and we're going to be using this later on in the video but the first one is going to be after burner and all this one does is it allows you to tweak different settings on your GPU and this program I'm going to go ahead and open it real quick here and as you can see from this program it allows you to tweak the clock speed the memory clock as well as your different Power limits and things of that nature and you can also do benchmarks with this program too so it it's kind of multi-function so I would recommend installing this on any gaming system also while we're here we can go ahead and open up Envy clean install now the purpose of Envy clean install is essentially just to install your GPU drivers but I would keep a copy of this installed on your system all the time but this is a really cool little program and we're going to go ahead and open it up real quick here and I'll show you is it will look at what the best driver is for your situation like on this one obviously you can see I have an outdated driver right now I got 5375 a and it's showing me that the best driver is program is a program called Heaven and the reason why I recommend downloading this one is not for The Benchmark functions of it but actually for its ability to put a load on your GPU so if we go ahead and open up MSI afterburner again as you'll see is MSI afterburner currently all of the GPU settings are sitting at idle nothing is boosted at all right now so if you wanted to overclock something it's really not going to make much of a difference because it's running it idle so you need to put a load on the card in order to be able to do any kind of overclocking with MSI After Burner and for that I would recommend using heaven and all you do is typically I make sure to disable full screen and I change the resolution down to something lower because it doesn't have to be your native resolution for you to use it and then you push the Run button and it'll go ahead and run the program and as you can see with the program running it boosts the GPU all the way up to its highest settings so then when you want to overclock it you can do it right here from MSI After Burner and stay tuned until the end of the video because I am going to show you how to overclock it too but but first we got to move on to the next setting here and for that this is only really applicable to people that are using Nvidia graphics cards but if you open up the Nvidia Graphics settings there's a couple settings in here that I would recommend changing so go down to the go down to manage 3D settings and from there you want to scroll down until you find power management and then once you find power management is should by default be on normal so if you pull this down you can go ahead and select prefer maximum performance and then from there scroll down until you find texture filtering quality and that one's going to be right here and as you can see it's set to Quality right here and I'm going to go ahead and set that one to high performance as well and then once you select both of those go ahead and hit the apply button and it should take effect now these two settings I've never seen them make much of a difference in the visual appearance of G but it could be good for a couple frames a second so it's definitely worth changing them cuz it's free performance why would you want to turn that down okay so the next setting I'm going to show you we're going to go ahead and close Nvidia control panel and we're going to click on our notifications so I like to disable these just because I don't want them running in the background and I definitely don't want to get notifications while I'm in a game which you probably won't but still if you go into manage notifications these are the settings we're looking at right here and what I would recommend is is unchecking all of these and then turning this little slider off right here and then since we're in settings we're going to go ahead and click on home and we're going to go into the gaming settings in Windows 10 right here and the first one that we want to look at is the Xbox game bar now this one I highly recommend turning it off unless of course like I said unless you're using it and then the next one I look at right here is under captures and just verify that recording background while playing a game is turned off because what this will do is it will constantly record video of you playing and then you can actually use this video by using the Xbox game bar but if you turn it off it doesn't do that and I think this just wastes resources in the game so I recommend turning it off and then the last one is game mode and this one is a little bit controversial but I still recommend turning it off and to do so you do just like that now here's the thing with game mode is it's supposed to make your games faster and it might in some cases actually do that in fact I should probably do a video where I test game mode on and game mode off to get a definitive answer on this however there are some games that simply don't play well with game mode and with the benefit that you get from it I don't necessarily think that it's worth leaving it on all the time but essentially the idea behind game mode is that it restricts some background services and allows more resources to go to the game itself however some games show an actual performance loss but then again that's all third party I haven't actually tested that to see if that's the case it's just what I've heard all the different times I've heard people talk about it before so I turn it off because of what other people say you know maybe I should test it myself what do you think let me know in the comments below if you think that's something I should do if I get enough people that want to I might do it anyway either way but now I'm going to move on to a bonus tip so let's get back on the computer okay so this next tip I'm going to show you how to overclock your GPU this is relatively simple and pretty safe but but what we're going to use is we're going to use two of the programs that we downloaded earlier this is going to be MSI afterburner as well as heaven so once we get both of these fired up I'm going to go ahead and start heaven and like I said just disable full screen mode and set your resolution down a little bit and then go ahead and hit run and then this is going to just sit here and run in the background and then what we're going to be working with is we're going to be working with MSI afterburner right here and as this is running you can see in the background you want to keep an eye on the visuals that are going through the program itself or going through Heaven itself because it's going to tell you how stable your card actually is so what we're going to want to do is we're going to want to play around with our core and our memory clock but first I would recommend taking your temperature and your power limit and just maxing these out right here and then once you do that go ahead and hit okay and that should set those to the highest point where they're at and then the next step is just playing around with the core clock and the memory clock now I like to start with the core clock and what you would do is go ahead and click on it and right off the bat I typically add 100 megahertz and then once you enter that you go ahead and hit okay and as you can see right here it gave us 100 mahz and once you add megahertz to the core clock you want to take a look at the picture and make sure you don't see any artifacting or any hesitation or things of that nature you want to make sure everything's still running smooth and essentially just keep going with it now once you do the initial 100 Maher I would recommend going in about 50 Maher increments so if we go 150 now and hit okay and then just kind of watch the screen and see how it does and then from there we'll go 200 hit okay and then kind of see how it goes and then from here we can go 250 hit okay and then just kind of keep an eye on the screen and see how it goes and eventually what's going to happen is you're going to have a either Heaven is going to crash or you're going to have everything kind of seize up real quick and typically mine should have happened already mine usually happens around 240 but apparently it's acting really nice today so we're going to try to go even higher so we're we're going to go to 270 hit okay and as you can see there we froze up so we got a crash now so what we're going to want to do is at this point as long as the program crashes and the system doesn't then you're usually pretty good from here you want to back up to where you were before hit okay and then go ahead and launch the program again and this is kind of a long process because you have to keep launching the program every time it crashes but that's okay but once you get your core clock set to the way that you like it or the way that's least stable for you then you move down to your memory clock and with your memory clock this one right here I know that this card is capable of a really high overclock with its memory in fact I saved it right here if we click right here you can see I'm at300 however I would recommend finding that in the same way that you would finding the core clock going in small increments until you start having the system do flaky things and then once it does just back it off a little bit and that should be good now you're going to want to remember when overclocking your GPU it may work great in heaven but then as soon as you launch your game it starts crashing so Heaven only gives you kind of a rough estimate of what your card can handle what you're going to have to do after that is you're going to have to start going through and playing all your games and seeing which games are reliable and which games aren't if you have games that are starting to crash often then you'll have to play around with your memory and core clocks until you find something that works with all the games that you typically play like for instance on this one if I go to 220 on the core clock it works in every game I try except for shadow of the Tomb Raider it crashes just about every time with that one so I lowered it down to 200 just so shadow of the Tomb Raider would run and unfortunately it means it's going to be a little bit slower in all my other games but you can also keep different settings for different games if you can keep up with it another thing that I would keep in mind also is that these cards nowadays are extremely Advanced so the chances of you harming ing a GPU because of overclocking is actually kind of rare however it could potentially be possible and it could shorten the life of the GPU as well by running it at higher frequencies however I've never personally had a GPU fail because I overclocked it so I usually am pretty liberal with how much my core clocks can run if it's not crashing then I'm usually pretty happy with it so with these settings you should pick up quite a bit of performance but this is all going to depend on your Hardware some systems might do better than others but you know what stay tuned till next week when we do the same thing with Windows 11 but in the meantime does making gaming performance better even matter well check out this video where I discuss the myth that your eyes can't see more than 60 frames a second it's kind of a silly myth and I suspect only believed by people who have systems that can't do more than 60 frames a second but as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 49,926

Keywords: windows 10 gaming, overclocking gpu, how to optimize windows 10 for gaming, how to setup windows 10 for gaming, NVCleanstall, msi afterburner, Heaven Benchmark

Id: 3km3JHJ7KaE

Length: 22min 3sec (1323 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2023