Windows 8 on a gaming pc

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ajollyroger

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Does anyone have windows 8 on a gaming pc?

I heard that windows 8 pro takes up only 20 gigs of hard drive space. I have a 60 give SSD that i am thinking about installing it on and giving it a try. I am wondering if there are any pros to trying Windows 8.
 
Why dont you install the trial and see for yourself, most games work without issues on Win8.
 
I'm using Windows 8 on a gaming system. Performance is pretty much identical to Win 7 and it boots faster.
The games explorer doesn't really work in Win 8 (not that it worked well in Win7...), but you can just create links to all of your games in Steam to make life easier.
 
64GB SSD for Windows installation only

Works fine.

about 40% free space on it, I have all my programs go to a 1.5TB 7200RPM drive, Windows 8 boots fine.
 
I'm not encouraging you to use 8, but there are ways to tweak it to reduce disk size. Keep in mind benchmarks are really back and forth, in some cases 7 is slightly better, in others 8 is slightly better.

If you do go with 8, you can do two things to reduce the size on the SSD:

1) Reduce the size of the hibernation file (used for fast boot). Go into your power settings and disable fast boot. Then open an elevated cmd prompt and type in powercfg -h size 50. This will reduce the size of the hibernation file from 75% of memory to 50% of memory. Now go back to power settings and re-enable fast boot.

2) Set the page file for static min max. This method allows you to have a very small page file, but still have one in case it needs to be used. The default page file size is 1:1 with your memory. This process simply reduces the minimal size, keeping the maximum the same as default. Set the minimal to 500MB, then set the maximum to your memory size (1024 * mem), so if you have 8 GB (1024 * 8) = 8192MB.
 
I have Win 8 Pro installed on a 64GB partition on my laptop's SSD. With several programs installed and Visual Studio + several GB of local help, I've only managed to use 40GB including the hibernation and swap files. It boots really fast, but I don't really care for it and still use Windows 7 99% of the time since I installed Win8.
 
No point bothering with 8. There's no performance increase and it has various issues with certain titles like any new OS.

So no benefit, yet a bunch of potential problems.
 
CMadki4 said:
Judging by his sig rig, I'd guess Domingo is rocking it on an SSD.
Click to expand...

Indeed. While pricey, its has been a terrific purchase for everyday use. I've probably save myself hours waiting around for things to load.

Win 8 boots nearly instantly on a SSD, which is also pretty cool.
 
I put win 8 PRO 64 bit on my flash drive and downloaded all of my games and put them on a 750 gig sata drive. and i still have 24 gigs of free space on my SSD. Windows is running really fast and have tested games and they work well. no problems. SSD's are the way to go. :D
 
DeathPrincess said:
No point bothering with 8. There's no performance increase and it has various issues with certain titles like any new OS.

So no benefit, yet a bunch of potential problems.
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I had more problems with windows 7 because of AERO. I've had zero issues with windows 8 gaming.
 
Stoly said:
I had more problems with windows 7 because of AERO. I've had zero issues with windows 8 gaming.
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Windows 8 UI is just as GPU accelerated as Windows 7. Aero was just the name they chose to use on 7 for the GPU accelerated themes. Nothing has been removed from 8 in this regard except for the name and default transparency.
 
Add me to the list of people that have had fewer gaming issues on Windows 8. There's definitely a learning curve to tweaking your start menu and various icons, but for gaming it's straightforward. I'd run into some aero issues in the past and they're long gone. Refresh-rate switches for movies seem to work better, too.

I just use Steam and Origin as my gaming front end (especially now that the "grid" view can be tweaked to look great).

Plus (not just in Win8), both Steam and Origin can install games to other drives now. That's good for people with smaller SSDs.

I'm not sure I'd push people to swap to Windows 8 for gaming reasons, but if you already have a copy or bought a new PC I don't think there's a reason NOT to use it.
 
The ownly problem I how with W8 is that FRAPS does not work with steam.
 
I have win8 and all my apps/games installed on a Crucial 256GB SSD. Every game I have that worked on win7 works perfectly fine on win8.
 
DrDoU said:
The ownly problem I how with W8 is that FRAPS does not work with steam.
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Really? I am running the 3.5.99 update and have had not one issue with FRAPS other then which corner of the screen it appears in.

For the record, I am running 2 SSD's in Raid-0 with Windows 8, not one issue.
 
I installed Windows 8 Pro on my game drive to test it out. It ran just fine and I had zero problems with it. I eventually wiped the drive and stuck with Windows 7 pro. No reason for me to switch, and I don't like Metro. ClassicShell improved things substantially in that arena, but I didn't see the need to move to Windows 8 at the moment. I don't remember how much space was taken, but I think it was comparable to a fresh Windows 7 pro install, if I remember correctly. My game drive is listed in sig.

Non-ramble version: It worked fine, but I'm sticking with 7 due to personal preferences. :)
 
I am really surprised at some of the windows install sizes people are reporting. I have Win 8 pro on a 128gb SSD and with just windows, office 2013, and chrome i am at 43.2 gb. This is a fresh install and i have no games, movies, music or anything installed.
 
kilobyte said:
I am really surprised at some of the windows install sizes people are reporting. I have Win 8 pro on a 128gb SSD and with just windows, office 2013, and chrome i am at 43.2 gb. This is a fresh install and i have no games, movies, music or anything installed.
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I may be having a false memory, but with Windows 8 pro and Office 2010 - I was sitting at around 80-ish gigs free. I don't know. I only had it on long enough to put Far Cry 3 on it and give it a go, and mess around with it for like a day. At the end of the day, I got rid of it. :confused:
 
I don't have an SSD on the machine I use windows 8 on, but it works fine for games. In fact that is a purposeful decision windows 8 boots up so fast it beats both windows 7 machines running SSDs and the windows 8 machine has the slowest hard drive in the house. I can only imagine that with an SSD its faster. I just run metro and don't really have a problem you have to get used to it but the main thing I did was bind a mouse button to the windows key. In that case its the task switching button on a Logitech G400 and that really is the item that makes windows 8 scream, they should have made that a requirement for new windows 8 hardware.
 
Running my sig rig on windows 8 now and it's a champ. Can't say I notice a huge difference from Win7 other than boot, but so far all games are working properly.
 
I believe that Win 8 installs an image of the entire Win 8 installation directory that you can delete if you need the space. I *think* you can remove it using the clean-up wizard.
I can't recall the specifics, but the people running Win 8 on a Surface were reporting this back when it first hit.
 
Domingo said:
I believe that Win 8 installs an image of the entire Win 8 installation directory that you can delete if you need the space. I *think* you can remove it using the clean-up wizard.
I can't recall the specifics, but the people running Win 8 on a Surface were reporting this back when it first hit.
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I'd be interested to learn more about this.

And if you did an upgrade from Win7 to Win8 be sure to delete your windows.old folder. Mine was over 12GB.
 
Try the disk cleanup and see if there's anything unusually large in there. I *think* that's where there was an easy option to clear it out.
I'll have to dig around and find out where I read that.
 
I must be in the minority, tried Win 8 for a few months and absolutely hated it. Even though I paid for it I deleted the install and went back to Win 7 and was happy. Not trying to start shit just saying it wasn't for me.
 
bigmac11 said:
I must be in the minority, tried Win 8 for a few months and absolutely hated it. Even though I paid for it I deleted the install and went back to Win 7 and was happy. Not trying to start shit just saying it wasn't for me.
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You're far from the minority. I think most have been opposed to Win8 for various reasons.

Actually I just switched back to Win7 due to compatibility issues with SolidWorks and one of my CAM software. It's good to be back. Even after trying a few start menu applications for Win8, I just didn't really like the feel. It was very pretty though.
 
Windows 8.1 needs to iron out some issues otherwise, windows 7 will still reign supreme.
 
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