i7-7700K -- Incredibly long game load times after upgrade?

[WAZ]

I just rebuilt my PC, upgrading from a 7-year-old Athlon X4 to a new i7-7700K. Was and am still using the same 4GB Geforce GTX 970. Also have 16GB of PC3200 RAM.

Prior to rebuilding, I was able to play Hitman and Fallout 4 on reasonably high settings, with pretty quick/reasonable load times. Honestly probably above average and surprisingly good for how old my system was (aside from the new 970 video card).

However, now that I've reinstalled on the i7-7700K, it takes forever for these games to start up. I timed Hitman last night, and it was a solid 3 minutes of black screen before I got the intro text and title logo. Fallout 4 takes a couple minutes as well. Once in-game, the quality and speed are all great. But 2-3 minutes to even start the game seems wrong on a brand new system... especially since my old Athlon X4 used to load these same games in about 20 seconds.

Any idea what this could be?

 

[crashtech]

Sounds like a problem with the disk subsystem to me. Did you start with a fresh Windows installation and make sure the proper drivers were installed?

 

[WAZ]

Sounds like a problem with the disk subsystem to me. Did you start with a fresh Windows installation and make sure the proper drivers were installed?

I did start with a fresh Windows installation... however, now that I mention it, a weird thing happened and I'm not sure how.

In the Windows setup (booting from DVD), it asked whether to upgrade. I said no, deleted the whole partition, created a new partition and formatted it... then installed.

BUT, then I noticed that there was a Windows.old folder in my C: drive, which implied to me that it DID (somehow) do some sort of upgrade and/or retain SOME reference to my old installation. But how?

 

[crashtech]

Even though it ignored your deletion request, it sounds like you ought to have the right drivers. Do you have an SSD? Seems like downloading a hard drive benchmark like CrystalDiskMark might be a good idea.

 

[RichUK]

Check device manager to see if there are any drivers that require installing / updating.

Go to your motherboards website and install the pertinent drivers, such as the Intel Management Engine / chipset drivers.

 

[Shmee]

Definitely check drivers, and the HDD/SSD. I assume this is Windows 10 64 bit, right? It would have to be, as Kabylake does not support earlier windows versions. Also, be sure to download up to date drivers from Nvidia for the 970.

 

[WAZ]

Yeah, it is Win10 64-bit, on a new Samsung SSD. The Samsung Magician benchmarks look good, I think. I have the latest GTX970 drivers, and made sure to install all drivers from Gigabyte.

I do, however, have two "Unknown Devices" in device manager, for which I cannot add/update drivers. It's no additional hardware or anything that I have installed, so my guess is it's possible it's some chipset or something on the motherboard that has not had drivers installed. Any way to force-determine what those are, if it can't find drivers for them?

 

[Teizo]

Install the IME drivers (Intel Management Engine). That will install the drivers for the unknown devices and maybe that will get rid of your loading problems. I had the same issue with this board. You might want to update to the latest chipset drivers as well (or verify they are installed).

Also, make sure you are using Samsung's NVMe 2.0 driver if you are using an NVMe drive.

Also, Gigabyte Z270 boards have a CPU over voltage issue atm, so make sure you update to the latest UEFI bios that coincides with your mobo.

 

[WAZ]

Thanks for the replies everyone; definitely sent me in the right direction. I couldn't get IME to recognize the unknown devices, but with your advice I was pretty confident it was something between the SSD and Intel drivers. It was not hardware failing or a software issue, so that was good.

Between my inability to recognize the mystery devices and the fact that my initial Windows install had done that weird upgrade thing instead of a fresh install, I decided to reformat and install everything from scratch. Windows installed properly this time (no windows.old folder, and it also created like 4 new system partitions it hadn't done the first time, so I know I got a proper fresh install). All Intel drivers installed fine this time as well; no errors, and no Unknown Devices anymore, and now all my games load fine without that 3-minute delay. Still not positive exactly which drivers/devices were missing, but either way they're all installed now so I'm happy. So all fixed, thanks!