Question Mysterious CPU Performance Issues After Windows Clean Install

[dread_serious]

Sorry for the incoming wall of text, my buds and I have tried to fix this for a bit and we've tried a ton of things. I've been having issues with my PC's gaming performance following a clean Windows install. I've always had two hard drives- one HDD and one SSD. Since I got the HDD when I built my computer [specs located at bottom of this post], my OS, files, and some games were located there before I bought an SSD exclusively for gaming purposes. While the two were connected gaming worked just fine- I could run most games at low settings at a constant rate and some even at medium, which was OK in my eyes. However, recently my boot times and file explorer/general OS-type things slowed down- my boot times specifically were going over 15 minutes sometimes. So, I figured it was time for an upgrade and a clean install- I bought another SSD for my OS/Files and got around to clean installing. However, following a clean install onto the SSD and subsequent driver/relevant software installation, I began getting performance issues on games that I installed that I believe may be tied to my CPU-


Examples of performance issues following clean install [HDD OS install version performance shown in brackets for comparison]:

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive- Framerate loss, "staggering" [HDD install version had none of these issues]

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)- Game crashes on launch, gives error code "0x00007ffaa1b7c6f4 7641592 0x00001337 ntdll.dll"; all listed solutions on support forums for this error yield no results, including deleting "players" folder, repairing the game through the battle.net client, and updating drivers etc [HDD install version launched and ran]

Valorant (I know, I know)- Major stuttering issues [HDD Install Version ran very cleanly, at medium settings even]

Oddly enough, well optimized (e.g. Monster Hunter: World and Dark Souls 3) or very undemanding (e.g. Golf With Friends) games ran very similar to how they ran on the HDD install at low settings.



As for what we've tried, I have compiled a list-

Updating/Installing all recommended motherboard and GPU drivers- Did not fix issues listed above (specific driver versions are listed along with hardware at the bottom of this post)

Installing relevant software (e.g. DirectX, etc.)- Did not fix issues listed above (specific software and versions are listed at the bottom of this post).

Installing DDU and reverting to the same GPU driver version as the HDD install- Did not fix issues listed above.

Turning off potentially intruding applications such as Game Bar and Discord Overlay- Did not fix issues listed above.

Cloning the HDD onto a clean SSD and seeing if same performance issues are experienced- Strangely enough, it did fix the issues of game performance, but retained the issue of ridiculously long booting and OS operation times.

Overclocking the CPU through Ryzen Master (~15% increase in processing)- Did not fix issues listed above and lead to very rapid CPU heating (word of note- I had never had to overclock on the HDD install, I figured it would be worth a try to see if it was a hardware issue).



As of the time of this post, I am still experiencing the performance issues listed above. As a computer, the system works fine- boot times are quick, and application movement is snappy. However, I built this computer to game, and this is a mystery that I cannot solve, even with the assistance of some of my IT friends. Any advice is much appreciated, many thanks!!!!!



Hardware:

Motherboard- X370 Gaming Plus

CPU- AMD Ryzen 7 1700

GPU- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

RAM- 16 GB DDR4 RAM


Installed Drivers:

GPU- GeForce Game Ready Driver Ver 445.87

On-Board Audio- Realtek HD Universal Driver Ver 6.0.8911.1

System & Chipset Drivers- AMD Chipset Driver (Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition) Ver 19.10.36

LAN Driver- Realtek PCI-E Ethernet Driver Ver 10.38.11 18.2019


Relevant Installs:

DirectX 12

Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2019 Redistributable x64 14.25.28508

.NET Framework 4.8

 

[Karadjgne]

Start over. What you described is common when windows gets installed on multiple drives.

During install, windows looks around for all available ways to ingratiate itself into the pc, and having multiple drives, it does just that. It installs parts of itself on both. Prior windows didn't do that, only windows 10 does, and it's messed up many an install as a result.

My advice would be to remove all the drives (just unplug the data cable from the mobo) except for the OS drive and that sticks windows entire on that drive. Afterwards, you can reinitialize the other drive, and it becomes an add-on to, and not part of, windows, so you can set documents and pagefile or whatever on it and it's linked, but still seperate.

You'll also want to visit the motherboard website and download the specific motherboard chipset drivers for lan/audio etc, if there's not an all-in-one media package.

 

[dread_serious]

Hi Karadjgne,

Thank you for your answer! Unfortunately I have already tried that- when I clean-installed windows onto my second SSD (the new one that I had bought recently) with no other drives connected, I experienced the same performance issues that I had experienced with the other drives plugged in.

To make matters worse, I'd also downloaded and installed all of the available motherboard drivers from MSI's site during that second install, to no avail.