[SOLVED] I'm stumped and could really use a second opinion

[Ian neal]

DISCLAIMER: I'm new to building PCs so forgive me for my ignorance. I am trying to learn as I go along.
So I recently re-installed windows 10 after having issues getting my OS to boot. I reinstalled windows 10 via USB (Windows media creation tool ) and I've only been able to get it to boot from the boot manager and not the SSD itself. On top of that, I'm having severe performance issues and have pretty much got nowhere with it. I've spent a lot of my free time after work for the past 5 days trying to troubleshoot the issues and made very little progress. I've been browsing a lot of the forums here and have learned quite a lot and have done a bunch of troubleshooting that has helped a lot but still, for the most part, am having performance issues still. I'm hoping maybe someone can help me see something I've overlooked or help educate me in what I'm doing wrong or even point me in the right direction.
My Specs are as follows :
Processor AMD Ryzen 7 1700 Eight-Core Processor, 3000 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 16 Logical Processor(s)
Motherboard ROG STRIX B450-F GAMING
Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti

 

[Darkbreeze]

Booting from the boot manager IS the way it is supposed to work, unless you select the boot override one time option below the normal boot options on most motherboard BIOS.

It is not wrong or abnormal for Windows 8.1 or 10 to boot from the boot manager, as that is how UEFI works for these operating systems.

If you want to boot from a specific drive partition instead of from the boot manager you will likely need to disable the UEFI options in the BIOS and enable the CSM option. (Compatibility support module) Booting from the boot manager is the recommended method when possible though.

 

[Ian neal]

Oh, that's really helpful. I was starting to wonder if that was the issue with performance. Would you mind pointing me in a general direction for troubleshooting the performance issues? I've done lots of benchmarks and none of them are really helpful.

 

[Ian neal]

Here's one of those benchmarks for reference.

 

[Darkbreeze]

The first thing I would do is check to see that you have the MOST recent motherboard BIOS version installed. If you don't, I would suggest you research how to do that, locate the latest BIOS firmware update from your motherboard's product (Same page as below, select the BIOS option though) and update it.

Next, if you have not already, I would recommend that you install the latest AMD chipset drivers from here:

https://www.amd.com/en/support/chipsets/amd-socket-am4/b450


Next, download and install the network (LAN/Ethernet) and Audio drivers from your motherboard's product page, located here:

｜｜ASUS USA

www.asus.com

Next, it's probably a good idea to do a clean install of your graphics card drivers as described here in my guide:

How To - How to perform a CLEAN install of your video card drivers.

Updated 9-19-19 How to do a CLEAN install of your graphics card drivers using the Wagnard tools Display Driver Uninstaller A major issue on many systems is the presence of multiple graphics card drivers or drivers that have been incompletely uninstalled followed by the installation of...

forums.tomshardware.com

And it is a very good idea to check and make sure that you have your memory modules installed in the correct slots. There is a lot of confusion out there about this, especially given the misleading information found in many motherboard manuals that make confusing references to "channels" in a way that confuses things. To be clear, if you have two memory modules installed they should be installed in the 2nd and 4th slots over from the CPU socket. That is for ALL dual channel motherboards whether they are AMD or Intel, from the last at least ten years.

 

[Ian neal]

Alright, so I went ahead and updated the motherboard with no issues. But when it comes to the clean install of the graphics card drivers I had a ton of issues. I had two back to back bluescreens of death with separate stop codes. The first one was " irql not less or equal "and the second one was "Kmode exception not handled ". I went ahead and reuninstalled the graphics drivers again and reinstalled them. For the time being, I haven't had any more blue screens. When it comes to the memory modules I have mine installed in the first and third slots closest to the CPU and never had an issue with them being there before I reinstalled windows. If I could best describe the issue I'm having it would be that I'm getting the right amount of frames but it's almost as if it's " skipping " frames. Like it never dips below 60 frames but it does a ton of " skipping " around. The best way I can describe it.

 

[Ian neal]

However, I just realized that I didn't update my LAN / Ethernet drivers. Could that be causeing performance issues like that?

 

[Darkbreeze]

ANY driver can affect ALL other drivers AND the performance of the system in general.

As for your RAM, regardless that you had them installed in different slots previously, that is irrelevant. Those are not the correct slots for use with two modules on ANY dual channel consumer motherboard AND also according to your motherboard manual. And every other dual channel motherboard manual as well. It is ALWAYS the second and fourth slot for dual channel motherboards whether it is AMD or Intel. Always. No exceptions UNLESS there is a problem with a specific slot and even then, that problem is usually due to bent pins on the CPU (For AMD) or motherboard (For Intel) rather than a problem with the motherboard DIMM slots themselves. Rarely though, a DIMM slot will fail on an older board and memory might need to be moved to the 1st and 3rd slots, but it is not the default location and it is not the location that BY DESIGN, the architecture expects to first see populated. If you wish to leave them where they are, you are not really interested in configuring your system correctly and solving your issue but that is completely your prerogative.

Make those changes, would be my recommendation, because that is the RIGHT way to configure the memory for your system. I do not however believe it to be the cause of your problem but it COULD be contributing to lower performance than you might otherwise have.

I think your problem is likely related to drivers, whether for the LAN, Audio or graphics card, or chipset drivers.

What did you update on the motherboard? The BIOS version or the chipset drivers?

 

[Ian neal]

Alright, Thanks for the advice. I'll get to work on the RAM ASAP. Also I wasn't aware that the audio drivers could severely affect performance issues that is super good to know. And yeah I updated the BIOS version, I wasn't aware of chipset drivers for the motherboard.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Example:

https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...00-asus-b450-prime-plus.3522335/post-21281276