Hardware Upgrade of my dual boot Daily Driver

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[bbearren]

My daily driver currently consists of:

Cooler Master N200 Mini Tower Computer Case
Thermaltake TR2 500W ATX 12 V2.3 PSU
Intel DH87RL µATX Motherboard
Intel Core i5 4670 CPU 4 Cores
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo CPU Cooler
Corsair Vengeance LP 16GB (2X8GB) DDR3
LG Electronics 14x SATA Blu-ray Internal Rewriter
Samsung SSD 860 EVO mSATA 250GB
Samsung SSD 860 EVO 250GB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal (2 of these)
Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal (2 of these)
Samsung 970 EVO 250GB NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 SSD mounted in a
NVME PCIe x16 Adapter, Electop M.2 Key-M SSD to PCI 3.0 Express Expansion Card

I like the case, CPU cooler and PSU so I’m keeping them and the case fans.  I’m also keeping the 1TB SATA SSD drives, except for the mSATA drive.  The upgrades are

ASUS Prime Z690M-Plus D4 LGA 1700 (Intel 12th Gen) µATX Motherboard
ASUS Motherboard TPM SPI Module
Intel Core i5-12600K CPU 10 (6P+4E) Cores
Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro SL 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4
Samsung (MZ-V8V250B/AM) 980 SSD 250GB – M.2 NVMe (two of these)

I had everything except for the CPU, which arrived via USPS yesterday (Saturday, June 18).  I installed the CPU, cooler and RAM onto the motherboard yesterday, and today I’m going to power down and start my reconstructive surgery.  The mSATA drive was for my Windows 10 and 11 OS partitions, and I’ll be restoring their drive images to one of the M.2 NVMe drives.  I won’t be needing it or the PCIe Adapter because the new motherboard has 3 M.2 NVMe slots.

I’ll update my progress.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

• This topic was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by bbearren.

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TechTango

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Well, quite a leap from the 4670 with DDR3 to the 12600k with DDR4. You’ll be pleased (also probably surprised!)

I would have passed on the TPM module since the 12600 has TPM in firmware. Any particular reason you opted for two 980 M.2 instead of one larger (500GB or 1TB)? I only ask because typically, larger capacity means better performance and greater endurance (TBW).

I’m guessing you’re not a gamer since I don’t see a discrete GPU (just kidding, I know you’re not).

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Carl wrote:

I’m guessing you’re not a gamer since I don’t see a discrete GPU (just kidding, I know you’re not).

Gamers aren’t the only ones who use discrete GPUs.

I have an AUS ROG Maximus XI Gene motherboard with an Intel i7 9700K (overclocked to 4.9 GHz) and, since I do a lot of video processing, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 discrete GPU.

The discrete GPU made a huge difference!

It was taking ~2 hrs to process a 25 min video using the CPU but now takes less than 10 mins using the GPU. Also, putting the load on the GPU keeps the CPU temps down.

When I was using the CPU to do the video processing, the CPU temps would get up in the 85° – 90° range. Using the GPU to do the processing lowered the CPU temps back to 70° and the GPU itself never goes above 42°.

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Same here (video encoding- GTX 1070 OC) and also offloading to the GPU with simulation software. Keeps my NH-D15 busy (5800x) with temps approaching 70. 🙂

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Carl wrote:

Well, quite a leap from the 4670 with DDR3 to the 12600k with DDR4. You’ll be pleased (also probably surprised!)

Pleased, definitely, but not at all surprised.  I’ve had my system configured for maximum efficiency for years, so while there is a slight increase in speed that is noticeable, it’s not a big jump.

When one uses one large drive for OS, Users, and Programs, every file has to load through that single drive connection.  RAM and CPU can handle I/O at a very much faster rate, and the easiest way to speed things up is to put the main folders for a Windows installation on separate drives.  That way the necessary files can be coming through three different connections concurrently.  Bottlenecks are extremely reduced and everything is much snappier.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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Fathers’ Day took a few hours out of my upgrade, but I’m a happy dad.  I’m back up and running, both sides booting and running normally.  Still have a bit of tweaking to do in the UEFI, but I’m well pleased.

When I get close to what I want, I’ll post another update.

Carl wrote:

Any particular reason you opted for two 980 M.2 instead of one larger (500GB or 1TB)? I only ask because typically, larger capacity means better performance and greater endurance (TBW).

I upgraded 250GB SATA SSD’s with 250GB NVMe SSD’s.  I didn’t go for 500GB because I don’t need bigger.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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Where is the HDD for your swap file?

cheers, Paul

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Paul T wrote:

Where is the HDD for your swap file?

It isn’t on a HDD, it’s tucked away in a FAT32 partition on a SSD.

It has been there for several years, now, so it did actually begin on a HDD, but still in a separate, dedicated FAT32 partition.

 

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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bbearren wrote:

Keeping the page file on an SSD for a system with 16GB RAM is a waste of space on the SSD

A swap file is, or is not OK on an SSD?

cheers, Paul

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Paul T wrote:

A swap file is, or is not OK on an SSD?

Your question quotes from a topic from which we both had posts removed and where Susan said

Susan Bradley wrote:

Gentlemen we’re getting a bit personal here. Let’s keep this civil.

Curious that you are bringing it here. The OP from that topic included

Alex5723 wrote:

Thinking of moving pagefile from c: drive to d: 1TB HDD. Wonder if I’ll notice any degrading in performance.

The OP had two drives, a small SSD and a large HDD, hence yet another reason for my advice to move the pagefile to the HDD. My background for moving the pagefile to a separate drive in a dedicated partition goes all the way back to Windows XP, and I’ve been configuring my systems that way ever since. My pagefile is never on the OS drive.

In any system with more than one drive, my advice is always to move the pagefile to a dedicated partition on a drive separate from the OS. It is, in my view, a waste of space and a hit on performance/efficiency to have a Windows-controlled pagefile in the same drive/partition with the OS.

Consider that when files are being paged out of RAM in order to load necessary files into RAM, if the pagefile is on the same drive as the files being paged into RAM, that single drive interface is a potential bottleneck.

I have had only SSD’s in my Daily Driver for a couple of years now, and my upgrade maintains that configuration, upgrading a couple of SSD’s from SATA to NVMe. There is no spinner, only SSD’s. My pagefile (as noted in #2454794) is on a separate SSD in a dedicated partition formatted FAT32.

—addendum: since Windows 8 there has been a swapfile.sys on the OS drive, which is a “pagefile” for APPs.  If this file is moved, Windows will recreate it on reboot in the OS partition.  Then again, it is much smaller than the actual pagefile.sys.—

To sum up, in my view a pagefile is OK on SSD, but not OK on the OS drive. We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do. We don’t all have to do the same things.

Susan Bradley wrote:

One can agree to disagree.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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I set my paging file to a fixed 2,935 MB and leave it on the system SSD.

No issues. Since I have 16 GB of DDR4-2666 memory, the paging file may be a slight waste of space on my 500 GB SSD, but haven’t noticed any performance hits.

Don’t think Windows uses the paging file very much here…

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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JohnW wrote:

I set my paging file to a fixed 2,935 MB and leave it on the system SSD. No issues. Since I have 16 GB of DDR4-2666 memory, the paging file may be a slight waste of space on my 500 GB SSD, but haven’t noticed any performance hits. Don’t think Windows uses the paging file very much here…

With 16GB RAM, the only files Windows is likely to  page out are those related to startup/shutdown.  With 500GB and a fixed size, 2,935 MB is negligible.

Since I always upgrade and don’t do clean installs, I’ve kept my pagefile on a separate drive in a dedicated partition without issue.  My hardware upgrades are facilitated using full drive images, so the configuration stays the same.

@Alex5723 had posted

Alex5723 wrote:

I have noticed that the free space on my C: drive 256GB SSD NVMe is shrinking. Found Pagefile.sys to be 28GB. My PC has 16GB of RAM and RAM usage was 87%.

and later,

Alex5723 wrote:

I have 16GB of RAM and pagefile reached 28GB (currently 24.5GB).

and then after taking control away from Windows,

Alex5723 wrote:

Since changing pagefile size manually, 3 days ago, allocated size hasn’t changed even by 1k.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

1 user thanked author for this post.

JohnW

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Using Image for Windows I had created full drive images of 5 of my drives. I didn’t bother with the 1TB single partition SSD that’s the dedicated target for my regularly scheduled weekly OS, Programs and Users drive images, since it was going to stay in the case as-is. I also copied the contents of the ASUS Z690 support CD to one of the 1TB SSD’s that was not going to be changed out.

After changing out the motherboard and making all the requisite connections for fans, USB headers, Audio and the like, I removed the 2.5″ 250GB SATA SSD. I left the three 1TB SATA SSD’s in the case. I also removed the 250GB NVMe from the PCIe adapter, since I now had three available NVMe headers on the motherboard.

The first order of business was to disconnect my Blu-Ray drive and use that SATA connector for the 3TB HDD that contained all my full drive images. I didn’t need to mount the HDD, just lay it in the case temporarily. I installed one of the new NVMe SSD’s in a slot, booted into my TBWinRE USB thumbdrive and restored the mSATA SSD drive image to the NVMe SSD. That drive is where my EFI partition and Windows 10 and 11 live.

After that image restore, I rebooted into Windows 11 successfully. I had a temporary swap file created by Windows (my dedicated swap file partition was yet to be restored) and no background wallpaper, but Windows booted. I had no LAN yet because the correct drivers were missing, but LAN wasn’t necessary for the transition to the upgrade.

I shut the system down and installed the other two NVMe SSD’s in the remaining slots, rebooted and restored my Users full drive image to one and my Programs full drive image to the other. I then powered up and Windows booted normally, showing my desktop background correctly. I then navigated to the ASUS Z690 support folder and ran the installation of drivers for the new motherboard. That called for a couple of reboots, but after the last reboot I had LAN and internet connectivity.

Somewhere in the middle of all this my three kids and I gathered at my oldest son’s house for some BBQ and Fathers’ Day celebration, which I enjoyed very much.

Next I went through Advanced system settings to see if all my preferences had returned to normal, and they had.  My swap file was back on its dedicated partition and now everything is in place, running normally and Windows is Activated.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

2 users thanked author for this post.

RetiredGeek, JohnW

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It’s amazing how readily a working Windows system will now boot successfully onto completely new hardware, almost without skipping a beat! Quite unlike the bad old days when you mainly had no other option except a clean install. I had attempted to Sysprep a Windows 7 system once, going from a Pentium 4 to a newer build. But that ended in dismal failure requiring a clean install. Probably user error, ha!

So a couple years ago I pulled off a similar feat as yours (kept the case, fans, and drives). Running Windows 10 Pro, I swapped an aging Ivy Bridge 3rd gen Intel Core setup to a 9th gen ASUS Z-390A with a Core i5-9600K.

Held my breath… The system booted up, and it took a few minutes to automatically configure the Microsoft drivers for the respective new hardware, and then it was up and running! Then I manually added the remaining specific drivers from ASUS and other hardware manufacturers. Awesomeness!!! 🙂

Congratulations on your successful upgrade!

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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bbearren

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bbearren wrote:

With 16GB RAM, the only files Windows is likely to page out are those related to startup/shutdown. With 500GB and a fixed size, 2,935 MB is negligible.

I arrived at that 2,935 MB number by first letting Windows assign it automatically and that’s the number it chose for me. Then I switched that to a fixed manual size so that Windows would not be resizing it later.

I speculated that Windows had somehow chosen that particular number as optimal based on my RAM. I dunno, maybe it’s just a default. But it looked good to me! 🙂

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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I’m old school like you. For my machines, I set a 250GB OS partition which contains the OS and A-V software – nothing else. Windows “libraries” (video, music, docs) are moved to separate data drives. “Program Files” are installed elsewhere. I have a dedicated drive for sim software and dedicated dev partition for servers (Apache, MySQL) and IDEs. The end result is quite similar to your setup.

While I do this for I/O reasons, there are also other considerations (data recovery for example). Up until a few years ago, my standard config was mirrored OS drives and a large drive array for everything else. For my recent builds, I no longer have any spinning rust and thus no drive arrays.

When I build machines, my primary goals are stability, longevity, ease of recovery, and then performance. My current daily driver only has 3 PCIe 4 NVMe slots, but I have more that 1.25 million files/data sets.

I now opt for the largest NVMe drives I can afford (1TB at this point). My prior builds had 250GB boot/OS drives; my current has a 1TB NVMe boot drive with dedicated 250GB OS partition and 1TB NVMe data drive. Why? Performance (I/O) and longevity (TBW) of larger NVMe drives was too great to ignore. For less demanding storage, I use SSDs which can be easily moved between computers.

I also agree with you regarding swap files and never use the OS partition/drive for this purpose. With 32GB RAM, however, I’ve not observed the swap file(s) being used with one exception.

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After completing the hardware upgrade and checking that all my UEFI and Windows settings were intact, I created a new set of images.  Then, since I’ve been running Windows 11 Pro on unsupported hardware, I decided to do repair/reinstall to take care of any crumbs that might be lingering.

I downloaded the latest ISO from Microsoft, mounted it and copied the contents to a folder, rebooted into the Admin account, and ran the repair/reinstall from there.  No hiccups, just that those annoying ‘Special Folders’ get reconstructed.  After ripping them out root and branch in the registry, I booted into BootIt UEFI to get rid of the Windows implanted Recovery Environment so I could reclaim the space and get that setup where I want it.

I followed this instruction set to extract the WinRE.wim file and get it in my preferred position.  Then I followed this instruction set (mostly) to get Image for Windows into the Recovery Environment.  I say mostly because the last couple of version upgrades of Image for Windows has put a Utilities button that makes it even simpler to do.

Windows 11 is fully updated and everything about the new hardware is doing what it’s supposed to do.  I’m pleased with the results.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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