Any total gurus on machine 'snappyness', extreme 'general desktop use' / browsing

Hardware Build a PC
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Hello all,

Based on videos from Wendel, I think this community might be most likely to have the right kind of technical skills and interests to build very particular rigs for particular purposes…
So fingers crossed.

Please don’t judge, tired of getting into internet arguments over the years… my use case is very particular.

With that out of the way:

I’m an old school PC user for a long time who is always “doing stuff” on my PC, a lot of stuff. I mostly browse but I browse with hundreds of tabs open at a time, if not more, a lot more.

I do “stuff” all the time, scanning filesystem with wiztree, extracting archives, creating archives, copying files, uploading something somewhere, editing text documents, editing pictures, copying stuff off the drone, formatting USB keys, writing usb keys, testing usb keys with h2testw, ssh into my other systems, fiddling with proxmox, downloading ISOs, etc.
Opening way way too many web pages for help, etc.

I’ve been on PCs since DOS 5 and my adhd / autism style usage hasn’t changed. I’m also ridiculously impatient. I want to click something and it just happens. (I bought the WD Expert 7200 rpm the second it was released for example)

I currently have an obscene amount of tabs open and I’d love to close many, but I do like to confirm I’m “ok to close” them, before I do so…
ie: I’ve finished that idea / project / article (again, I bounce from topic to topic, all year round) so there’s always tabs open I should be closing.
Problem is, that many tabs can get quite laggy, even with 6 cores, 12 threads, 32GB memory.

So to get to the point:

I may, or may not build a pretty insane rig and I’m trying to decide what to build. I do want to use desktop parts but I’m trying to decide what and I’ve got money to spend.

I’ve got some business grade 35w desktops here which I’m a fan of, but I’ve crushed all of them, intel 7500t, 8500t, 8700t, 12500t, AMD 5650Ge etc - I can make all of them quite painful to use in chrome, with 32GB.

I was wondering despite benchmarks to the contrary… if my particular use case might find that an X3D processor actually helps with general ‘snappyness’ in windows? This is extremely important to me.

Also debating 5600, 6000 or even 6400 memory (64GB)

I can run MMC and monitor some stuff, or latency mon, I can run task manager. I just want a PC where I click a tab in chrome and it comes up, even if there’s in excess of 1000 open. I’d love to be able to quantify the problem to be honest, it’s hard to show it without plain old recording a video.
(No one appears to benchmark this, googling will only result in chrome compilation benchmarks)

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Do you have to use windows?
Just a thought, maybe use windows in a VM for only the tasks that require it.
I want to say fast ram would help and more of it.

I’ve noticed windows is a little quicker after finding a good debloat script that removes all the unnecessary background services and “features”
Also setting windows gui to performance mode theme whatever windows calls it.

Do you need chrome? Maybe use edge? It’s chromium based and I hear it is really faster.

also, look into running PiHole on your network. Pages load so much faster without all the ad cdn’s trying to send you crap. Which only loads more useless stuff into ram

And of course having a really fast OS drive is the biggest speed upper.
Look at NVME storage pci Gen4 or 5

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I find it’s a little bit of everything. My old cow of a system is pretty darn quick and also lean/mean from Ntlite cleaning out a lot of garbage I don’t need in windows.

Did you have a general idea of what you are looking for parts wise. Most newer cpu,ram,all that jazz are quick enough as it is but that snap you get when loading up and send everything down a rabbit hole of neverending upgrades.

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Try to identify what slows down your PC.

Hypotheses:

  • not enough RAM - to keep all the data from “an obscene amount of tabs open” (upgrade RAM)
  • generally too much unnecessary content (ads, tracking, etc.) in content of “an obscene amount of tabs” (fix: add “uBlock Origin” or similar browser extension, alternatively: use pihole)
  • DNS - general latency resolving the IP addresses for all the content in “an obscene amount of tabs” (fix: use a quick DNS server: Quad9, google, etc.)

My hunch is all the above apply, but your symptoms are only explained by the a mix of the first two.
There are obviously different steps required to address them, but none of them require “upgrade CPU”.

I sympathize with your way of browsing, but it has serious downsides besides the slowdown you’re experiencing.
Typically, when there are that many tabs open and each require a confirm to close, the tabs and browser will stay open for days, even weeks, on end. That prevents a timely upgrade path for the browser software (by default on relaunch), which should be considered important for online security.

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if you have a am4 system already I would recommend any X3D chip for it, pair it with a nice samsung gen 4 drive and you should be pretty happy

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Pay attention to memory ranks, not just capacity and channels. Ideally you would want one dual-rank DIMM per channel.

Also avoid 16-bit chips, 8-bit is best so minimum 8GB on DDR4 and 16GB on DDR5. So for best latency you would want 2x16gb on DDR4 and 2x32GB on DDR5 to get dual rank DIMMs.

However, it should be noted that not all 16GB-DDR4 and 32GB-DDR5 are dual rank, so don’t automatically assume they are by capacity alone.

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I totally need to use Windows. I run linux and bsd for several things in the house but I’m extremely particular and extremely experience with Windows, I can “get stuff done” stupid fast in Windows.

I regularly re-install Windows and it’s not loaded up with junk. (I only regularly re-install because I’m constantly changing PCs)

Chrome is mandatory too, it’s the only browser with the plugins which will basically make my internet experience perfect. Chrome is nearly flawless except privacy and performance. It’s stable as high as 3000 tabs.

I already run PiHole and Ublock. Primary issue is for example opening a new blank tab or closing an existing tab, when she’s REALLY loaded up. Can see times as high as a second to do this or more in bad days.

Yes really.

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I’m an ITX fanboy and considering a B650 AsRock (also a fan) system, with a 7950X3D and 64GB of 5200,5600,6000 or 6400. Assuming there’s a noticeable difference increasing memory speed.

I just totally and utterly want the system to respond wildly fast in /general windows use/ and primarily web browsing.

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image
image540×701 31.3 KB

I have found a like minded person.

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I’d go for the 7800X3D, the other die doesn’t have the extra cache on the 7950x3D

You won’t have to worry wether or not it’s handled by a 3D core or not

Cheaper and easier to cool too

That being said loading up all four dimms on am5;can be troublesome as the system doesn’t like to go much pas 3600mhz if it’s got 128 or 192GB of ram

I don’t remember how it handles 64/96GB of ram on 4 sticks

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agree with this, don’t even give the windows scheduler a chance to run a thread in a non-ideal core. Intel’s current consumer processors suffer from the same problem with p and e cores.

Another thing that gives noticeable increase in snappiness is to stop using flash SSDs and get Optane, it really is superior.

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Äh ok Nobody Mentioned Intel Optane as Boot Drive and drives in General…

edit literally one Post above :smiley: edit

You want snappy?

FIRST buy an Optane Drive big enough for your Windows and App needs THEN compare to „normal“ nvme‘s…

Optane feels on a nother Level „snappyness“ whise.!!

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It’s unlikely to be DNS, due to PiHole. I do run Ublock with it.
Sorry let me be clear, it’s not the loading of the pages, it’s the SWAPPING of the pages, closing of pages, opening new pages.

In the interest of just making this easier for everyone, here, check this.
6 core, 12 thread ryzen pro 35w cpu, 32GB with over 6GB memory free

i.imgur.com/xLoJUE3.mp4

This behaviour is specifically worse, when many, many tabs are open.

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Oh my goodness me, wow.
I mean this whole thread is sort of a lie, because I don’t have 2400 tabs open right now. I have 2400 tabs open on browsing PC#1 - Browsing PC2 has about 1200 more (I lost 1000 somehow) and then Firefox has 3000 open but that’s … we don’t talk about what I use firefox for. I don’t use it all the time.

Damn never ever come across someone to beat me, wow.
What system? How’s the responsiveness? How many plugins? which plugins?

How’s the delay on opening a new tab? Closing an old one? Switchign to an old one? Middle clicking open 5 new tabs?

See this video for when she really is losing it :frowning:
i.imgur.com/xLoJUE3.mp4

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The question is, does the 3D VCache help in browsing / ‘general snappyness’ when benchmarks by reviewers indicate it’s a crappier chip for ‘production work’

I feel like these guys are benchmarking very particular stuff like cinebench or handbrake or some other canned benchmark but NO ONE is running an intense, multithreaded “thrash the PC” macro based benchmark. Anandtech used to many many years ago.

If it wasn’t for privacy concerns, I’d literally ‘package up’ my 2000 tab chrome profile, send it to someone with a beast PC and have them open it, ‘become me’ and see how it runs for them.

by the way, here’s my 12 threads right now ONLY working in this thread for the past 5 minutes. This many chrome tabs in the background def keep the PC busy.
Imgur

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I cannot fathom why anyone would not close tabs, Does the act of switch from tab 235 to tab 3457 of 7344 that you have not been in 5 months really not reload once switched to? Am I actually missing something by closing tabs? I means websites do update and you may be alt+tabbing into old/defunct/obsolete/wrong info?

Anyway, you should probably consider a Threadripper machine with maxxed RAM config? How much are you even willing to spend?

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The reason why it doesn’t help production is because it’s like a 200GB video being rendered, too much data for for cache
I’m willing to be bet a large chunk of chromes core program fits in there

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There’s a History tab as well so you can go to closed sites. I’m with you. No reason to have >100 tabs open unless, you are the government and are (ahem) really into keeping tabs on people.

I can only apologize.

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The system is fairly pedestrian, a i5-12600 (wanted to stay away from anything with e-cores) with 96GB of RAM.
The responsiveness is good as long as I restart it at least every month, by week #3 of FF running it will definitely start to feel noticeably slower than when it is freshly launched.
The only plugins I’m running are noscripts and ublockorigin; this is a portable installation of FF that that’s traveled between many systems over the last 15 years.

FF is a little slow to initially launch, about 8 seconds.
Launching a new tab is likely in the mid-triple digit millisecond range, about as fast as any other normal computer and closing is about the same. If I click on the “List all tabs” button, like you would do if you wanted to search for a tab via text, it takes about 3 seconds to resolve which is a little annoying.

​​​ ​ ​
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Tangent:
I’ve noticed over the years that some of the tabs/websites way back in my list have started to go offline; FF doesn’t actually cache the content of websites launched long ago through restarts so I loose access to these valuable resources when websites go down.
The wayback machine doesn’t capture many of these sites so I’ve started to use an offline website downloader to crawl websites I think are important enough to keep locally, the hardest part of this is getting the toolset that actually interrogates modern websites enough to get all the pieces necessary for them to work offline.

File>Save Page As… no longer works to adequately capture modern websites with the amount of rich interactive or cross-site content they have.

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Ah, fellow digital hoarder!

And here I though I was bad with my stash of hundreds of tabs for later.

Best way to improve performance here is going to reduce the number of tabs. You are probably taxing the poor browser to the limit at startup.

It also likely not going to get better in future, as even few hundred tabs is both extreme an extremely rare use case. Pretty sure no one at MS and google has this assigned as their quaterly feature improvement target.

If you really need that tabs ar references, start writing them down and categorizing by usefulesness:

Alternative solution would be firefox and its offloaded workspaces fuction (needs to be added back via addon).

This isnt something you can solve by throwing more hardware :slight_smile:

  • as long you have decent ssd, storage stops being effective bottleneck
  • same goes for ram, going above 32 GB has negligible performace impact, windows caching is not proactive enough
    • well unles you are running out of memory at 32GB, but i doubt that
  • high refresh rate monitor will improve your the feeling of snapiness, you cant go back from that
  • moving to linux would the best option, but lot of potential caveats there regarding hw compatibility
    • nvidia drivers are bleh
  • doing “optimizations” and slimdown on windows OS is not advisable. Guidelines are nonexistent, documentation is poor to none, existing tooling is script kiddie quality and most of the stuff you want to remove is too strongly interdependent with system core fuctions.
    • we are far away from n-lite a v-lite times :slight_smile:
    • microsoft neither want you to do this or actually offers documentaion and tooling to do it
    • you will achieve very little gain for very high chance of subtly broken system
    • any windows update will also remove all your customizations and reinstall verything you removed
    • best way would be getting LTSC edition, but it is not available outside enterprise licensing
      • i.e microsoft is absolutely not interested in selling these to private persons, you would have to enter MS volume licensing agreement or sailing high seas.
      • windows 10 has enterprise LTSC edition, but is going EoL soon and last ltsc is based on 21H2
      • windows 11 might have first LTSC edition coming out late this year, but it is going EoL also soon
      • windows 12, coming around 24/25 and can go fuck itself
      • also bear in mind that LTSC, only slim windows offering from MS, has shitton of useful functionality removed. You will eventually find out what the hard way. Its like retarded stepchild made to fulfill some committee request rather that serious os variant.

Incidentally, have I told you about our lord and saviour GNU/Linux? :rofl:

Seriously, running linux as primary os and running windows as KVM virtual machine, might be the best solution perf wise. As long you hardware is not kneecapping you ( curse you nvidia 2070s !).

I am mentally preparting for the same migration, right now its W11 + fedora 39.

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