Question Win 10 1903 update really crushed performance, Haswell-E

[skeedo]

So the 1903 update wasn't available for this chipset until around mid September when I installed it. Ever since I've been just getting horrid performance in Windows in general, apparently much slower drive read speeds even on an SSD. For instance switching to a different Chrome tab will take a couple seconds to load instead of being instantaneous. The important thing is that I'm not able to notice any severe decrease in gaming/ GPU performance. I would still like to know if it'd be possible to fix my Windows performance however. I'm guessing it's the meltdown/spectre protection microcode update that has likely caused the performance decrease? I've not yet updated my Bios to the latest because I'm not sure that it would help anything. From what I've read, Windows will still use the software microcode patch even if your Bios has the updated microcode.

I even recently installed the 1909 update which was supposed to fix performance issues w/ 1903 and the Haswell-E chipset, although I can't say I notice any difference. Anything I can do to fix Win performance before I shell out money I don't have for a new cpu and motherboard?

 

[UsandThem]

Something else must be going on. Your system specs are plenty good for running Windows 10 without any of the performance issues you addressed in your post.

The security updates (both BIOS and Windows) has a small impact in overall performance, but shouldn't be enough for you to notice. If I were you, I would flash the BIOS to the latest version, and then do a clean Windows 10 reset. If after that you are still experiencing issues like you mentioned, you likely have some type of hardware issue. At that point, you can begin testing individual components and see if you can isolate the issue.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Agree with @UsandThem 's assessment of the situation.

Try doing an SSD disk benchmark. SSDs get slower over time, as they get internally-fragmented, and fill up, and approach "steady-state" performance, which may be half or less of new performance, especially for budget or DRAM-less SATA drives.

Make sure that Disk Optimizations are running in Windows 10 for that SSD as well. (TRIM)

Do you have a third-party A/V installed? Especially around major OS upgrades, they may slow things down / need to be updated themselves.

Lastly, what SATA controlled driver are you running? If Intel, try the MS driver.

 

[Shmee]

Yeah, it sounds like an issue with the SSD or windows install. Or maybe unstable OC?

 

[DAPUNISHER]

All good advice. If you want to eliminate software mitigations as a culprit for peace of mind, use inspectre and turn them all off.

 

[skeedo]

Just an update on this issue...

I spent two months trying to solve the problem with no success. This morning I decided to try turning off spectre/ meltdown microcode patch for Windows. Wah-la, problem solved. No more lag switching chrome tabs. No more stuttering Youtube videos. Windows in general much more snappy like the way it used to be. I've flashed my Bios to the latest version so while I'm protected there, I did read that some vulnerability may exist not having the Windows patch. It honestly does not matter to me one bit as spectre/meltdown exploits are mostly theoretical and there's really no evidence out there of data breaches being directly attributed to these vulnerabilities. I'm not going to go as far as saying that this whole thing is a hoax by chip manufacturers to get you to upgrade your PC and devices as the patch only seems to have a very noticeable affect on my particular chipset. I will however say that it seems awfully convenient for chip makers to wake up one day and say that "every CPU we've made in the past 20 years is affected by these vulnerabilities".

 

[UsandThem]

I will however say that it seems awfully convenient for chip makers to wake up one day and say that "every CPU we've made in the past 20 years is affected by these vulnerabilities".

That's not what happened at all.

Hackers (ethical kind) found the vulnerabilities and reported them to Intel / AMD. Intel initially downplayed the severity of the problem, before all the various exploits were discovered. To this day, people are still discovering similar vulnerabilities almost every few weeks.

Just because you don't think the vulnerabilities are serious enough and decided to not have your system patched to cover them all, that's your decision. For people who do sensitive work on their PCs, especially on work computers, the smart money is to keep the system fully patched to minimize security problems.

For example, here was yet another vulnerability discovered about 3 weeks ago: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-csme-security-flaw-vulnerability-firmware

And here is the mega thread where you can see how bad it has been for Intel over the last 2 years: https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...l-meltdown-spectre-discussion-thread.2532563/