What do you do to best maximize the performance of your PC?

[DND]

I recently installed the Crew Chief and was reading about dedicating the Mod to a specific core of the CPU and it got me thinking of what people do to maximize their PC.

I have run and applied a modest overclock using the ASUS BIOS tool for my k CPU. And after the initial boot of the PC I run the GPU Tweak II and run the Gaming Booster, then click on OC for my 970 GTX. After which I then power up my Fanatec wheel and then start the Steam application. I don't run any other mods during the game and the PC only has the typical Windows crap and does not have any non-sim racing related applications as it is devoted to racing only.

So I ask the community what do you do to maximize your PC and assuming I am not changing my hardware what could I do to maximize mine?

 

[dud]

Binding to specific CPUs or cores should rarely be an advantage. At some point you will get screwed over as program flow passes in and out of the OS kernel and ends up with a useless constraint. I assume you don't have anything else running on there of course.

An exception might be if you are using a multiprocessor system with NUMA memory banks (multiple memory banks, each associated with one specific CPU). The OS should be smart enough to sort that, but if you are running other workloads before your game it might have felt constrained in memory placement. Likewise, your PCIe slots (and other I/O) are only connected to a single CPU in such systems. Again, the OS should keep all this sorted for you but it gets difficult now. When the OS starts your executable it has no way of knowing that it wants to be close to the PCIe slot holding your graphics card. If you end up on the other CPU for a while then that CPU's memory bank will be loaded with the game data and with the heap of game's dynamic memory, so you would cross-render across the entire machine.

Myself I am mostly focused on avoiding I/O from block devices, both for the foreground application, and to make sure there is no background nonsense doing I/O. Obviously when both happen at the same time you stutter badly. My gaming machine is single CPU.

The most important thing to facilitate that is enough RAM. The best way to avoid I/O wait is not to make I/O faster by buying I/O hardware, it is to avoid I/O.

 

[Terry Rock]

A good way to maximize your PC, is to make sure you tie the fastest motherboard controllers to the fastest harddrives and keep those drives free of space robbing, unused junk programs.
I can't tell you the number of PCs I've seen where guys basically hooked the harddrive without consideration of buss speed.