Gaming on Windows 10 for Workstation?

I have a new build that I’m waiting on the last parts for (B550 delays), and I saw the announcement for Windows 10 for Workstations. I knows that my hardware is not really work station class, 3950x and 64gb of ram, but I am curious if there would be any performance gain or determinant of using Windows 10 for Workstations vs Windows 10 Pro when gaming. I use my machine for Solidworks occasionally when I need to do some work from home so a workstation focused version appeals to me but not at the detriment to what the computer is mainly for which is gaming.

I don’t see anything that is a benefit for gaming:

I Imagine there is probably less bloatware out the gate but that not anything I cant remove manually. I’m more interested in having issues with compatibility with games, lets say anti cheat and things like that.

IDK, but I didnt see anything in it that made me even consider putting it on my game pc instead of Win 10 Pro.

Windows 10 for workstations offers something MS calls “Ultimate Performance Mode” (along with Win 10 Enterprise)

It supposedly enables the CPU to remain in boost longer, and pushes other performance variables. It’s intended for workstations and systems with above average cooling… so not a typical Wraith cooler for example.

Other than that, if you have more than 64 cores, or 512GB of ram, Workstations doesn’t gain you anything.

It would seem you can enable Ultimate mode under W10 Pro now too

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Yeah Win 10 Pro alrady had that for > 1 yr so nothing special for Win 10 Wks to have it.

There is literally no difference between Pro and Pro for workstations in terms of gaming. It might have a couple less apps out of the box, but that can be fixed in pro by five minutes in the start menu, or by powershell.

Pro for workstations has ReFS, SMB direct(RDMA), NVDIMM ram support, support for more ram and CPU count. So nothing that will effect gaming.

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That is mostly what I figured but wasn’t sure. My work machine would not benefit much from the upgrade either but the ReFS support seems nice but we have daily backups and I never lost any substantial amount of data using ntfs and even then we have the daily backup.

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ReFS has too many limitations for me to use it normally. No hard links, no native compression, no page file, no quotas, no native encryption, no extended attributes, etc. The encryption can be worked around via using BitLocker, and junctions are available instead of hard links, and it is posible some of the other missing features have alternatives.

The check summing and integration with storage spaces is nice, but I would rather use BTRFS or ZFS for that sort of thing if posible. It also works well with Hyper-V vm images, so I might use it for that if the need ever arose.

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As much as I would love to mess around with some of those file systems I know that if anything ever went wrong and I did something that wasn’t a certified solution I would be in a fairly large amount of trouble at work. They are very into buying something prebuilt that works rather than building and tinkering, which is fair at some level.

I use Windows 10 for Workstations on one of my systems only because of it’s improved ECC support and ReFS. The features in Pro for Workstations are not features that would help you in gaming unless you want to game from a RAM disk or something like that in which case, congratulations on being born rich.
There is a slight advantage to Pro for Workstations, in that there is no bloatware installed by default. This could help performance in gaming but it’s not anything you can’t fix yourself. To make it easy you can use a script like this one to selectively remove bloatware and disable features. https://gist.github.com/alirobe/7f3b34ad89a159e6daa1

I’m running ReFS in production for Hyper-V storage and I can attest that there is a dramatic improvement in speed when checkpointing, growing dynamic VHDS, and merging. I wish they would utilize copy on write more with ReFS but that would conflict with their interest in VSS.

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Using W10 for Workstations just to get ReFS is legit. Go for it if you want to, and expect it to perform identically as normal W10.

Heck, the modern windowses are so similar that you can even game on W2019 Server if you want to. (Why would you?)

Btw there is a workaround if you want to use ReFS on normal W10 Pro. You can create the storage spaces array and format it as ReFS in a windows version prior to them deprecating the feature. Saves you the expense of a pricier windows license if it matters.