Finally gave in and put windows 10 on my gaming machine. I accidentally bricked my Windows 7 install while trying to update my GPU driver so figured it was my cue to just bite the bullet and do it.
I'll have to read up more on how to block the telemetry stuff and all that crap. It's on a different vlan and the machine really won't be used for much other than gaming, so there's not much data they can really get on me anyway. There's no mic connected to that PC either.