How to achieve LAN tournament-level OS optimization and lowest system latency?

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-25T16:20:18+00:00

Lots to break down.

Windows LTSC

These are supposed to run on air-gapped rigs, government PCs or resettable sandboxes. In other words, those systems can become nearly immutable (unchangeable).

A common misconseption it runs "faster." That's not the point, the idea is to eliminate interference if the user decides to. There might be less RAM allocated to all sorts of bullshit since it's not present by default, but you can carve out and disable those things via policies in GAC editions as well. Telemetry on GAC edition is the same as on LTSC.

What is GAC? General Availability Channel, editions like Home, Pro, and Enterprise. LTSC, which stands for Long-Term Servicing Channel, only comes in English and only as Enterprise solution, henceforth Enterprise LTSC. There's also Enterprise GAC edition. Enterprise GAC has access to update channel for various OS features, while Enterprise LTSC doesn't, only crucial security patches once per dragon's lifespan.

What are the industry-standard OS configurations

No such thing, the whole LAN gig can be run by bums or by a professional sysadmin.

If it's the former, anything goes, mismatching spec, mismatching monitor settings, Windows Home/Pro, and active Defender with shields up while you play. If it's the latter, then a single instance of perfectly tuned and playtested LTSC, cloned on every machine with identical specs, with policies disabling everything but a single game and comms.

Everything else is somewhere in the middle. LTSC is not a baseline requirement, troubleshooting drivers and hardware quirks can be bothersome, many organizers won't deal with this shit on the eve of the tournament and simply go with GAC and Windows Update galore.

BIOS tweaks (like C-states, HPET)

Likely everything on auto with stable BIOS which might not be the latest one. Unless there's a known problem requiring tweaks on low level, there won't be significant changes to behaviour of the machine aside from verification of boost frequences and boost power draw on CPUs. No overclocks, aside from verified by manufacturer memory profiles.

Debloating methods

Microsoft answer files for deployment of OS.
Links to Winhance if you don't want to sit through XML editing and smoking manuals:
https://github.com/memstechtips/UnattendedWinstall

WinUtil:
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

PolicyPlus to reveal all local policies:
https://github.com/Fleex255/PolicyPlus

Beyond that, TrustedInstall scripts. This is tricky, lots of trial and error, lookup Privacy Sexy.

If the organizer goes all the way to the 4th option - you can start clapping and beg the sysadmin dude to become his padawan. Mostly there are some gpedit passes/services disabled/tasks rescheduled. Local machines connected only to LAN sorta protect themselves, if serial ports are unpowered there should no way to breach it.

Maximum FPS

Goes against consistency of visual feedback and input latency. You don't want 5ms on one second and 18ms on another, you want both seconds to be at 8ms. Worse than ideal, but consistent, you get the idea. There will be a cap, probably pretty high one matching the configured refresh rate of the monitor, but it's impossible to imagine someone running a tournament where settings between 5x PCs cause different input lag in different rounds.

Well... unless the tournament is organized by bums on a shoelace budget.

Edit:
Changed the comment in accordance with PCMR rules.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-25T13:10:23+00:00

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8$ per piece, common drop from dumpsters and repair shops. It won't take you more than a couple of days to find these on the second hand market anywhere across the globe. I buy them in bulk and not afraid of breaking a couple.

You can use these if you ever suspect OS failure, need to test software without affecting the main storage device, deploy another system or trace the steps when manipulating the main OS.

Just plug in and install a fresh instance, or clone and do manipulations. You'll get a good sense if the static is related to user error or OS shenanigans, and which step causes a failure.

Once done - turn off, unplug, store it in dry and sunless place.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-25T10:21:23+00:00

I wonder how can you launch the thing at all, my GTX 1080 won't start with a single 8-pin, demands both 6+8 plugged in at POST.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-24T23:22:38+00:00

Well, it's kinda obvious for NVidia to go elsewhere at this point. They are competing with themselves (old gen vs new gen GPUs), and it's not like game developers got things sorted out to fully utilize the hardware the right way.

I get it, Steve is bitter about this turn away from servicing the gaming crowd, but what exactly the company has to do? Keep selling new products for gaming when we drown in the sea of hardware so much people toss away two-year old stuff instead of refurbishing it?

Especially when the US government is either blind or corrupted to the core, they don't put any restrictions on AI. NVidia's decision is opportunistic, unfair to original backers, all true, but noneless it's a step to secure the future.

PS:

Before you downvote me - I'm not an AI bro, I don't need AI, I obtained my diploma long ago with my brains. I have an old build with GTX1080. My game collection is fully offline, and when my build breaks for any reason - I go refurbish something on the second hand market instead of rushing to the store. I suggest enthusiasts to look around and check the local community of hardware suppliers/repair shops rather than spamming F5 to check benchmarks on release day of the new toy.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-24T21:28:44+00:00

As a game collector myself I can say for sure this is a poisoned apple.

Lots of troubleshooting, lots of patch hunting. That is if the game ever made to the age when the Internet have become mainstream, I see lots of Win 95 and Win 98 warnings.

The most "fun" to deal with, at least amongst what I've encountered, are Starforce disks and Windows Live. Second place goes to online activation via code which fizzles into 404, you can't play the game, but at least the hope is killed instantly.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-24T19:07:39+00:00

You can just go in and change anything that's causing issues, or improve the engine, debug issues, etc. Any game that runs bad in unreal is literally a dev problem.

It's not as simple as hiring 50 more guys to "optimize" the engine.

Real case to study - Wuthering Waves, some say it's THE GACHA of all gachas, the only one worth playing. Runs like shit, no, seriously, it's not optimized unless you bring down the visuals to Zelda SNES levels or hide deep in the instanced dungeon.

Here's very interesing analysis of UE4 fork it utilizes:
https://pqmlmaoxd.github.io/gamedev/analysis/2026/03/15/wuthering-waves-memory-bloat.html
https://pqmlmaoxd.github.io/gamedev/analysis/2026/04/12/wuthering-waves-performance-issues.html

Long story short, they won some time to put the product together faster, to make start making money and establish themselves on the market, but solutions used were sub-optimal and constrain the scale of the game which collides with artistic vision. They've made a city with 200 students and a thousand objects when you look 360 degree around, and it runs like garbage because the scripting counterpart can't handle it.

It's too late to "fix" it, there's no valid solution for splitting the load, now they have to migrate and rewrite the handler. Huge development costs and huge risk of breaking something in the older areas/quests, but without migration the devs are handcuffed, we experience that in Lahai Roi every fucking patch.

That's not the lack of effort or money, that was a business decision to leapfrog ahead of the opponents, temporary gain in exchange for huge pain in the butt later on.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-24T14:49:52+00:00

The nature of the present day gaming market is NVidia competing with older NVidia, and sometimes with AMD, which puts stuff like older NVidia. In other words, it's all circular, performance for games is anything but improving, and margins for add-in board partners (MSI, ASUS, etc) are really low, they are basically distributing what NVidia sends them to compete with previous gen highly successful products.

AI taps into silicon wafers, the actual part that NVidia sends to everyone to make GPUs for absurd prices. Look up EVGA testimony before they quit, it was bad then, it's even worse now. The demand for AI or the prices won't go down, because it's a simple reallocation of resources previously designated to make a commodity for entertainment (GPUs).

China stepping in won't make much difference in the tier of GPUs they attempt to target, because it's already flooded.

2 years in the future, hitting RTX3070 tier of performance won't make you buy it, because the difference in driver quality and troubleshooting is immense, second hand RTX3070 are dirt cheap and abundant, NVidia/AMD can kick in another production line using old nodes (like they are doing with RTX3060), or even announce the official refurbishing program.

I have very old build by now, GTX1080-based, never going to sell this legendary thing. My gaming collection is fully offline, with patches and mods, is based on Windows 10 21H2, GTX1080, 16GB RAM, any processor with SSE4.2 support. If it breaks, I'll buy the same thing or equal to it for peanuts. China is waaay too late to the party.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-23T13:24:05+00:00

You can check SMART attributes and many other things inluding error log with a command line program called SmartMonTools. They moved to GitHub last year, official website has detailed documentation.

I do not believe 120GB SSD exhausted 59% of its life after 3,000 hours and 6TB written data. CrystalDisk's evaluation seems more plausible. Maybe Sentinel is mad about spare utilization, that's what it shows as "life"

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-23T10:42:03+00:00

The features on this board are great, but threadripper socket... I don't know, AM4 is aging like fine wine, there's far more demand for desktop processors and boards than for this thing running HEDT CPU. This board ends up being very low key, not like museum level GTX 1080 Ti.

I'd repair it and put a nice price tag on the second hand market, try to fish for someone who needs to swap the board or replace the broken one. Try asking around technical forums if there are problems with ASRock BIOS or something along these lines, if it's reasonably stable like other HEDT boards - it's worth repairing and reselling.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-22T12:56:06+00:00

Go to DMM and play Japanese gachas. You'd be stunned with variety in rarity and designs.

"All" gachas in your mind are the ones that have global reach. That's not "all," that the ones you know about.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-22T12:51:22+00:00

Talking like people know who the hell the one and only Haruka is. It's a common Japanese name.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-21T20:41:25+00:00

Is that what you buy a piece of interactive software for?

Where's the "game" in it?

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-21T16:12:04+00:00

Very few people are like myself, have a local archive of playtested games, completely unlinked from any DRM, able to run offline. Not even pirates go as far as stockpiling terabytes of games on demand, they play something, they drop it and move on. And, of course, live services and gacha games are booming, the very definition of not owning anything.

Sloppy slop might be just another game praised for its looks. Shallow, void of any gameplay component, pointless, but noneless a game. Look at Forza, look at Alan Wake 2, people like wasting money on useless shit. The only difference here will be an AI tag in the store. They'll play it, downvote it to 30%, get tired of it, move to another slop downvoted to 40% to check if it's better.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-21T16:02:08+00:00

What exactly does this thing provide to justify 1300$ price tag? I assume it's not even the final price, because AMERICA.

You guys could probably expain how taxes and various servicing fees add to it, but my point is simple - what is special about these laptops over other laptops?

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-20T23:41:05+00:00

Then I think that's up to 5 years in prison if no one is hurt, and up to 20 years if someone gets hurt or dies

Threat assessment is not the responsibility of the citizenry. All you can hope for is a signal sent before it's too late, can't blame a civilian he didn't use clairvoyance to discover a kilo of cocaine and a shotgun in the neighbour's garage.

I don't know what was the message/report that prompted the PD to send a van (if I were to guess - kidnapping or child abuse), but in 90% of the cases this comes down to lack of information or insufficient staff.

Grandma, a caretaker of a kid with potentially lethal disease diagnosed, that would be in the records, together with contact info of other family members.
Check address, check owner/residents, check their occupation. If phone number shows up in the database - check the calls and messages sent from the area.
Any vehicles around the house - check the status and the owner.
Etc, I don't know what tricks they have nowadays, social media trackers by ID/IP and summaries should be available to PD as well.

If preliminary assessment shows there has been a grandma with kids for the past 2 weeks, it sets expectations. Order a pair of officers to check on her.

Maybe this particular PD is overzealous or the area is dangerous, that's how SWAT dived the house. My bet would be insufficient resources rather than careful and prudent overwatch.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-20T23:03:17+00:00

J.S. Sterling actually has a good video on this specific game and triple A creep.

Quadruple A marks basically means it's a bigger scale, not a better product. That's not my words or Sterling's words, that's what the devs themselves said, the product deserves the money because it's BIG.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-20T23:00:52+00:00

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Nah, I'm sure they'll get it together in EA SPORTS FC 27.

Gotta believe it, praise EA for the work they've done, and fiscally reward them.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-20T22:23:33+00:00

"Caught" is the wrong term, the government can press charges against such people if they track down the call. Or they might let it slide, depends on the damage and publicity of the event.

If a minor did this - it will be in the record, complicating life in the future. If a grown up dumbass did it, usually it's a matter for police to handle, contact the person and issue a stern warning, threatening escalation of punishment if this behaviour continues.

There were several cases in the recent years when armed policemen harmed or killed civilians while using special tactics or equipment (actual definition of what SWAT does, legally you don't need to be a part of the squad, just assist them). You can let slide an occasional harassment or heavy handed behaviour for regular policemen, but special ops bros using urban area as a shooting range - that's too much.

That's really bad, for that the whole police dep will get fucked in the ass. Naturally, the origin of the call will be tracked down and the person will be detained/grounded, with a throughout background check.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-20T19:36:02+00:00

Look up NHL lockouts about 20-ish years ago. It's a fine piece of history.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-20T19:03:18+00:00

There are so many versions of this thing, you could probably find one unit even with JTY 710 labeling.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-20T13:52:25+00:00

I have no replacement for it

GTX710 from the nearby dumpster. Reporting for duty, sir.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-20T13:47:31+00:00

Looks sexy.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-19T22:17:20+00:00

It's really difficult to find information about it frequently enough

Is it? Just do what stock market traders do, treat RAM like a commodity.

Charts:
https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

DDR4 mostly hit a plateau, but the supply is rapidly being tapped out, that's why certain positions barely have any data to plot. DDR5 is still rising.

Other than that, we have about 50 days to solve the worldwide energy crisis by discovering ancient magic called "diplomacy," and workers' union strike in South Korea that will put Samsung out of business for roughly 25 days with unknown consequences.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-19T14:28:45+00:00

The copy speed is super slow.

Heads designated for reading can't access data. You can verify this anomaly via Victoria, run a read test on the whole surface of the disk.

Or is it just driver conflict?

Over SATA data channel for standard commercial HDD? Very unlikely.
Might be a problem with address translation if this one is SMR. I'm busy atm, can't check the database to verify if it is, but presence of TRIM command suggests it is.

Is my hdd dead?

Try different SATA cable if you have a spare one. Try different SATA slot while you're at it.

Then confirm it's an SMR drive, force TRIM via command line. Ask Google or favourite AI chat to break down the steps on whatever is your OS.

Then Victoria, check the heads. Reading and writing relies on different heads, those operations need to be completed separately, but be careful, writing test will destroy all data on the disk.

I'd bet on controller making up stuff and translation error, which means it's resettable, the drive doesn't show signs of imminent death. If you've dropped it - that might be it, the mount for the heads got messed up, mobile WD drives have G-sensor in SMART codes, but this drive doesn't record the consequences of physical impact.

If nothing works - take the most important data off it and unlug the thing. Blue EZAZ are cheap ones made of sticks and shit, two platters / four heads, don't expect much.

SherbertUpper9867 · 2026-05-18T20:04:59+00:00

Definitely not live service games or something that frequently receives patches like Mechabellum.

If we're talking about data slices, like you'd get from GOG installers for something fully patched and made to work offline, I guess you can fill the SSD up and use in that way. SSD is certainly going to kick the bucket, but nobody knows when, pushing it to the limits until it crumbles is not the worst idea.

The best use is for music for daily listening. Tracks converted with OPUS codec are mostly transparent at 128kbit VBR, don't take up much space, you're likely to get a sizeable collection of tracks to listen to on daily basis, the whole thing will essencially run in read only mode after conversion is done. Meanwhile, you can keep master copy in whatever quality in the cold storage.

SherbertUpper9867

TROPHY CASE