 Don't lie, you filled that nice squeaky clean Windows install with garbage, didn't you? Oh, I get it. You want to chat with your friends and download games and edit videos. But did you ever stop to think that all those things could be killing your FPS? Now, of course, everyone knows that having programs open in the background consumes system resources. So it stands to reason that a lightweight Windows install should perform better. But do you need to be concerned about that if you have a modern system? Well, in this video, sponsored by Seasonic, we'll be finding out exactly what sort of effect all the junk you might have running in the background will have on your gaming performance and whether you should get rid of it. And if getting rid of it will even fix the problem. In order to A-B test anything, you need to eliminate as many variables as possible. That makes setting up our test here a little bit tricky because here's the thing. Even two identical model CPUs or GPUs can have marginally different performance characteristics. So that means that every one of our benchmarks needs to be run on exactly the same hardware, not just the same spec hardware down to even our Seasonic Prime TX1000 power supply. This puppy, sick by the way. Modular interface, super quiet fan and 80 plus titanium efficiency. The only non-identical part is our boot drives. We've got a pair of crucial P5 1TB SSDs. We're going to have the full details of our bench and our affiliate links down below. The hardware is not the story today though. Where things get really interesting is in software. Both of our drives were configured with a fresh install of Windows 10. Then we applied identical update regimens. That is where the similarities end. The clean build got only what was required for operation. System drivers, Steam, Uplay, Epic Games Launcher and Nvidia's GPU drivers. Plus Chromium for a light-ish internet browsing experience. Oh and 7-Zip because you need to unzip stuff. We then went a step further and installed Win Arrow Tweaker. It's a super cool little tool that bricks Windows's ability to phone home, aka telemetry, as well as putting a stop to things that most people don't need. Like Cortana, Windows Ink Workspace, Task View and the like. It also attempts to intercept Windows updates before they are forced on the PC. Like the Windows malicious software removal tool, a notorious resource hog. As for the dirty build, it's downright filthy. We've got multiple pieces of security software fighting for resources. Then we've got Skype, Discord, Spotify, ShareX, Logitech Gaming Software, Courser, iQ, Steam, Ubisoft, Kinect, Epic Games Launcher. It's a lot of stuff. And the craziest part is that it's not that crazy. And these are all things that a normal gamer could easily have running behind the scenes. To add a little bit of a dynamic load, we're also throwing a 4K video on YouTube running in the background, because I heard Zoomers are super into multitasking. Let's start then with idle loads as a baseline. That was a snappy boot up. And Task Manager has us pulling a grand total of 1% CPU, of which 0.2. We are at 0% CPU usage. Not too shabby. I don't know if I've actually seen that before. 0% CPU. What's a RAM at? And for memory, we're sucking back a whopping 2.3 gigabytes. Not much else to say other than, damn, that's clean. Time to see the dirty boy. By the way, yes, we know we're not using the Gen 4 M.2 slot. It's a Gen 3 drive, it's fine. Oh, you know what? It's the coating on the screwdriver tip, Colin. That's why I wasn't able to short it before. ttstore.com. Actually, it's gonna be WAN hoodies before we have screwdrivers like that available. V2, baby. Got pockets for days. That's a dirty welcome. All right. Oh, God, the Microsoft Store is still here. Got some malware bytes down here. I mean, to be clear, when we said it was gonna have bloat, we didn't mean like bad bloat. Having malware bytes on your computer is a perfectly legit thing to do. Oh, God, Corsair device update. Oh, God, Corsair device update. What the hell is Glary Utilities, Colin? I just clicked all the boxes on that night. You know, all things considered, not that bad in terms of CPU usage anyway. Only about 2%. But memory is an entirely different story. We were sucking back over five gigs of memory now. That's more than double what we were doing with our clean machine. Now, the obvious answer to this is just to install more RAM, but most people these days are running 16 gigs, and buying more RAM costs a lot more than closing some background programs. Okay, this is not staying at necessarily two, sometimes around three. There it is. It's at three now. Four, five. What is Windows Explorer doing? I don't even have it open. Now we've reached the point in the video where I have to do a little taste test and see, can I tell the difference between the clean drive and the dirty drive? I'm gonna go sanitize this. I'll be right back. Let's try two different games, and then I'll try and tell the difference between them. So I think the thing that you would have the hardest time knowing the difference between is like CSGO or Doom because they're already at like 350 FPS. Why don't we do Hitman? I think there's like a zero percent chance Linus gets this without an FPS counter. Oh, okay. Okay, all right. I will go away and then you either will or won't switch it, I guess. Yes. I have my guess. Okay. I say this is clean and the previous one was dirty. That is exactly wrong. I'm disappointed in myself, my family, all my friends, my supporters. Really let us down. It's the opposite of an acceptance speech, a rejection speech. Here's the thing though. Just because I can't tell the difference by hand doesn't mean that there is no difference. So we did our homework and ran both of our setups through a gauntlet of benchmarks, starting with synthetics. In 3DMark Time Spy, we were within margin of error. I think it's fair to call this a tie. But moving on to Blender's classroom render, we actually saw a significant gap with the render taking an additional 14 seconds on our dirty machine. That's about 3%. We then saw a similar story for Browser Bench's JavaScript-based Speedometer 2.0, which netted a 4.25% reduction in performance on our dirty machine. The results then tipped even further in our in-game tests, with CSGO seeing our greatest difference with a 5% drop in FPS. Now, to be clear, that is still not the kind of thing that you're just gonna be able to feel using the machine, especially when you're pushing over 300 FPS. But it is measurable. F1 was tighter, only a 2.5% drop, and we saw a similar story with Hitman 3 in both the Dartmoor and Dubai-canned benchmarks. So across the board, the loss was minimal, but measurable. And there are two main takeaways here. One is that the more over-specced your machine is, the less likely you are to feel any kind of problem. If we've been running 8 gigs of RAM and a quad-core CPU, we might have seen very different results. Maybe that's a good experiment for another day. The second takeaway is that even with an over-spec machine, your background tasks are acting as a drag on your gaming performance. I mean, we didn't put this in the script because we didn't know yet, but it's funny to see about a 3% difference in performance with about 3% CPU usage at idle. So bottom line, you need to keep an eye on it. About half of you today are running 16 gigs of RAM or more, which is great today. But as your background programs get more resource-intensive, as their app to do, that might change. Hopefully DDR5 with its faster speeds, not to mention greater capacities, is going to bring some respite. We've actually got some content in the works around that. So make sure you get subscribed so you don't miss it. Now what I want to do is see if we can get some of that lost performance back. So what's the best one to run? Probably CSGO then, right? Since that's where we saw the greatest difference? Yeah, why not? Let's start closing shiz. See you later, OneDrive. See you later, Dropbox. Oh, God. Bye, everything. So is it as simple as that and we get all of our CPU back? Oh, no. Corsair still has services running in the background. Who else does? We're down to only 1% CPU usage though. Okay, well, we should be able to see that. It's time. Three, two, one. Scroll lock. Here we go. Point of clarification, our benchmarking was all run at 1440p. 41040. 41040? How close are we? Okay, so in our benches, dirty, like fully dirty was 40322. So we picked up 7 FPS. The clean build was 423. It looks like just closing stuff wasn't enough and WinAero tweaker is actually contributing to a difference in our performance here. What do we have still running in the background? That's pretty cool. I mean, there's still like anti-malware services sitting there, drawing 0.4% sometimes. Corsair service is still running in spite of the fact that I closed the actual tray application. Do you want to just try force closing those things? Yeah, we could try it. Dropbox service is still running. Dropbox update is still running. Everything search is still running. Like a lot of this crap is still running. Okay, so we further trim the fat. Do you want to go check it again? IQ started again. IQ service for MSI motherboard, I think. Wait, the LG hub updater started again. Let's see if we can pull another couple FPS out of that. Let's try it one more time. Boro864. We got nothing more. That's even less. Yep. The good news is this benchmark is really consistent. So it tells us that our difference between clean and dirty is real. And also tells us I think we're pretty much done here other than to thank Seasonic. Seasonic Power Supplies, whether you got a clean rig or a dirty rig, they have got the power for you. They've got everything from value power supplies all the way up to ones with insane 12-year freaking warranties on them and all the performance that you could need. You can check them out at the link in the video description. If you guys are looking for another video to watch, hey, maybe check out the does a faster SSD matter for gaming video that we did a while back. We tried everything from a SATA SSD to a top spec NVMe SSD and did a blind test to find out if our gamers could tell the difference.