soon I will be building a new system with Ryzen 5 1600X on a MSI X370 GAMING PRO Motherboard and some G.Skill 16GB DDR4-3200 RAM.
And I’ve seen some discussion threads on the internet, that talked about how Ryzen is better or worse on Win10 or Win7. Officially Win7 does not support the Ryzen platform, but as far I could find out, it still works relatively fine. But there are different opinions, which OS is better for Ryzen to use.
So I’m wondering. Are people in here, that can report from experience how well Ryzen works with Windows 7?
I’d rather prefer to use Win7 and stay away from Win10 if possible.
This is a subject I’m also interested in as the owner of a Ryzen rig. I’m thinking of using Win7 and dual booting it with Linux, given some of the issues with running a dual boot with Win10.
All of my research says that the difference is marginal. Close enough to be within margin of error for most things and win some lose some on others. Any differences are not worth running one over the other just for performance. You could imagine the buzz around the internet is one was truly superior to the other.
However, with some finagling, Windows 7 can work. After long periods of lock (not sleep, just lock) my keyboard and mouse would fail. I had to unplug mouse and keyboard and use different ports. Half the time my USB drives wouldn’t read.
Also, might have been the Windows 7 install, might have been Ryzen, but for updates I had to scan for updates, reboot, scan for updates and install. Without rebooting during the first scan, updates would fail every time.
Just my experience on Ryzen.
@Ruffalo recommends ShutUp10. I’ve never used it, but I have been fortunate to not have been hit by the issues others have experienced.
I’ve got a Win10 computer at work, that I regularly use and I still dislike it in comparisson to Win7, which I use at home and on my daily working laptop.
It’s really terribly not recommended. Microsoft is not applying hardware platform patches, optimizations or anything else really beyond security patches to Windows 7/8/8.1.
Many drivers are not optimized for Windows 7.
Windows 7 suffers from some serious performance impact due to Spectre and Meltdown Mitigations because a lot of OS functions are done in Kernelspace instead of Userspace. Font and a lot of graphics rendering features is a big one that’s done in kernel and leads to lots of context switches.
In general Windows 7 feels nicer, but is terribly designed from a technical standpoint.
For any new hardware you will be using for any length of time you will better off using Windows 10.
There is no argument about that technically. What version of Windows you obtain, how you obtain it and how you configure it is left up to you. (LTSB).
The choice comes down to: Do you take the support and performance with some minor data gathering by microsoft.
Or take the EOL OS with no supports, worse performance, security bugs and bad design choices with slightly less data gathering by Microsoft.
Here’s the kicker: If you run an updated build of Windows 7/8/8.1 most of the Windows 10 Analytics has already been transparently migrated over there too.
You’re probably going to have a bunch of little instances of bullshit on win 7. A lot of the the things that would keep you from using Win10 are backported to win 8 and 7.
Pro tip, install classic shell. Hide cortana… and you can hide the stupid action center. Theres a few more tweaks here and there but the UI will work like 7 for all intents and purposes.
Windows7 will basiclly work fine on Ryzen “if” you are able to get it running that is.
Windows7 doesnt support usb3.0 by default,
so you have to patch the iso with usb3.0 drivers.
Otherwise your usb keyboard and mouse wont work during installation.
With Ryzen you wont be able to install updates from the update manager the normal way.
But if i’m right with wsus you can.
Installation:
I think I installed it by imaging the SSD boot drive while it was attached via SATA to my FX system using dism/bcdboot. Integrated the AHCI driver via /add-driver. Then used PS/2 keyboard to install the rest of the AM4 drivers provided by AMD for Windows 7 and Ryzen, or maybe I just transferred the image from the FX system directly. idk
For NVME boot, I think using WinPEv10 would work. There is also this Windows 7 image updater that integrates the driver directly.
Performance:
There are no performance penalties at all. However, Win 10 does have optimizations when gaming on sub-standard/overloaded hardware. That said, unless you plan on gaming while at 100% background CPU load or with a GPU older than 6 years, that does not really matter.
Updates:
The CEIP is optional in Win 7/8 so, even if the telemetry code has been backported, it is not active, although there are scripts to remove it available. Be sure to use WuaCPUFix to fix Windows Update btw.
Conclusion:
In other words, it takes some time to set up, but otherwise works normally. MS removed accessibility features from Windows 8+, so Win 7 is still the only usable Windows OS for me.
As above, Windows 7 is not supported on Ryzen, Z270 or Z370 (or threadripper) or X299.
So, if you want to run windows, you’re officially stuck with 10. Microsoft have announced they will not be patching Win7 machines on unsupported hardware if i recall.
So… either run 10 and deal with the BS, or switch to Linux.
That said, most of the spyware is being pushed to WIndows 7 these days as well anyway. Sure, you can maybe disable it, but did you get it all? And why keep running software by a malicious company on your machine?
Its time to give MS the finger if you care about these things… things aren’t going to get better if people keep running Windows anyway.
