Vanilla WoW Client 1.12 settings for a present day system

Tested very successfully on an AMD Ryzen 7 3800xt PC with an ASUS 3070 GPU.

Monitor is a Dell 144Hz capable set to 120Hz in the NVidia Control Panel.

Don't let my hours of screwing around go to waste. Read on!

In game settings:

NVidia Control Panel settings:

That's it! Works great for me. If it doesn't for you, that's a shame. Keep playing around, you'll eventually find what works for you.

Windows 10 AMD driver installation order

 Hardware:

ASUS TUF GAMING X570-PLUS (WI-FI)

Nvidia 1080Ti GPU

        AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT cpu

        SBZ PCIe sound card

BEFORE INSTALLING WINDOWS, DISCONNECT ETHERNET
   DO NOT CONNECT TO THE INTERNET UNTIL STEP #8

Immediately after installing Windows, follow these steps. Be SURE to have all your drivers downloaded ahead of time, preferably to a USB stick. For this build, it was about 850MB worth.

1. DRV_Chipset.. (from ASUS)

reboot

 2. DRV_LAN.. (from ASUS)

reboot (may run install again after reboot)

 3. DRV_BT.. (from ASUS)

reboot

 4. SBZ drivers

reboot

 5. Nvidia drivers

reboot

 6. Disable the sign-in option to automatically finish setting up

(start > Settings > Sign-In options)

 7. Disable fast start

(start > Power Options > Additional power settings > Choose what the power buttons do)

 8. Power down, connect Ethernet, power up

If the Armory Crate install prompt appears, say no unless you want it

 9. Run the NVidia control panel and config as desired

10. Set time and TZ

11. Run Windows update and get a drink, you'll be here a while.

Reboot at least twice after the updates install

12. Run Windows update again! More updates guaranteed

Reboot at least twice after the updates install

13. Any other drivers, like keyboard and mouse.

Finally, activate Windows, if you want. You can't customize the UI until you do.

Disable driver updates Win 10

Open local group policy editor (start > run > gpedit.msc)*

Go to:

Computer configuration
  Administrative templates
    Windows components
        Windows update

Set the following policy to enabled:  Do not include drivers with Windows Updates

My understanding is that this will prevent Microsoft from pulling down driver updates for your hardware when it does regular security/feature updating.  I don't recommend this for all computers, only for those home built systems with parts from multiple vendors.  I get all my updates from Gigabyte (which is still making build 1809 driver updates for my two year old motherboard), and I do my own sound and gpu updates for the discrete cards I've purchased.  Letting Microsoft update these drivers automatically can have catastrophic consequences for some of your games.  Bethesda games in particular seem very sensitive to system changes after they've been installed.

*Note:  this is only applicable to Windows 10 Pro and Windows 10 Ent.  If there's a Windows 10 Home hack to do this, I don't know what it is.

GA-Z270X-UD5 Motherboard and Windows 10 Pro build 1703

Update 1/13/2019:  Did a rebuild today using Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019, which is build 1809.  Followed the install order below with the exception of step 11. Instead of doing that particular step, I instead enabled the group policy option to not include drivers with Windows updates. Here are the exact steps to enabling this. This is only valid in Win pro and Win enterprise.

Some notes I took with this latest install.  The build seems pretty solid, no major issues noted aside from the usual event log detritus that seems to be impossible to resolve completely.

Install order of rebuild:

 1. Windows (disconnect all but the single HD that Windows runs on.
 2. Renamed PC (reboot, and power off to reconnect HDs/CDs/DVDs that were DC'd)
 3. Turned off fast start under power options
 4. Chipset (reboot)
 5. MEI
 6. IRST (reboot)
 7. NIC (reboot, but on my own)
 9. GPU (reboot, but on my own)
10. Audio (deselected Z-Series Extras) (reboot)
11. Added hardware IDs group policy to prevent updates (below)
12. LGS software
13. Steam
14. Games


Hardware ID:
GPU (EVGA GeForce 1070 GTX) -
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_1B81&SUBSYS_62763842&REV_A1
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_1B81&SUBSYS_62763842
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_1B81&CC_030000
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_1B81&CC_0300

APU (SBZ PCIe card)  -
PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0012&SUBSYS_00101102&REV_01
PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0012&SUBSYS_00101102
PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0012&CC_040300
PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0012&CC_0403
HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_1102&DEV_0011&SUBSYS_11020023&REV_1009
HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_1102&DEV_0011&SUBSYS_11020023

Gigabyte GA-Z270X-UD5 Windows 10 notes

Order of software installation for each item. Rebooted after each software install.

• Downloaded all the motherboard related items from http://www.gigabyte.us/Support/Motherboard

Disconnected all drives but the one to be used as C:

Updated BIOS/UEFI to current version

Installed Windows 10 Pro

mb_driver_chipset

mb_driver_intel_me

• requires .net framework 4.5 (skipped - already installed!)

video driver (in my case, a 1070 gpu)

• set NVidia power management mode to adaptive, which works best for me, I think.

mb_driver_intel_irst

• disabled power management in this app and rebooted again

Intel nic driver

•  Deselected advanced features, as it threw up a warning about incompatibility with win10
•  Turned off NIC advanced power savings features
•  Disabled 2nd NIC

SBZ driver (crappy, messy product)

Logitech software

• throws up the main window *and* a firewall notice, which I allowed for private networks

Turned off driver updating in group policy (pro only feature)

Turned off the other update setting in system

Connected to network

Updated Windows fully

Setup OneDrive

Installed Samsung Magician (need to manually disable autostart from little icon)

• Only install if you have Samsung hard drives

Installed Steam (verification required)

Installed Chrome

Disable sleep/hibernate (Power options)

Disable Link State Power Management by setting to Off in Power Options/Advanced Settings/PCI Express

Disable fast start
Click Control Panel.
 Click Power Options.
 Click Choose what the power buttons do.
 Click Change settings that are currently unavailable.
 Scroll down to Shutdown settings and uncheck Turn on fast startup.

Setup file and folder exclusions in Windows Defender.  You'll have to figure out what needs to be excluded.

ASUS Z87-Plus Windows 10 notes

NOTE!
THE MAJORITY OF LINKS HERE ARE SPECIFIC TO THE ASUS Z87-PLUS MOTHERBOARD.  I CANNOT VOUCH FOR THEIR SUITABILITY ON OTHER HARDWARE.


Windows 10 installs very nicely on this motherboard.  The exceptions* to note are below, installed after getting a Win10 x64 PRO build completed:

- NVidia GeForce (uninstall the Windows supplied NVidia driver first using DDU with the safe mode option)
- NIC Intel
- IRST (SATA driver for the Intel SATA ports)
- ASMedia (SATA driver for the ASMedia ports)


My last build involved installing Windows, full Windows patching, then installing the aforementioned third party drivers.  I installed in the order outlined above.  I also (after Windows patching) turned off the Windows 10 "feature" of updating drivers automatically before I installed these third party drivers.  I don't know if it makes a difference to install them before or after the big Windows patches.  Who knows?

To install Windows, I disconnected all drives except for the C: drive, built a Win10 bootable USB and installed from that.  Be sure nothing is plugged into any other USB port other than the essentials (I'd keep it to just the Windows USB installer stick, mouse and keyboard.  Install your other stuff later).

*Note:  there are other drivers I loaded, such as my Creative sound card drivers, my Logitech mouse and kb drivers, etc.  But I did these well after everything else was done.  I consider the GPU driver to be of critical importance, which is why it's listed as a general purpose install with the other motherboard pieces, above.  If you have an AMD GPU, or are using the integrated Intel GPU, substitute those drivers for the NVidia and install in the same sequence.

Also, did more reading on IRST.  You don't need to install the application, just the drivers.  The application may make more sense if there's going to be RAID configuration involved, otherwise it's mostly just eating resources.  The application, when running, looks like this in the taskbar:

Keep in mind that IRST driver versioning could be noteworthy.  In my case, I'm using the version recommended by ASUS for my motherboard/OS combination.  There are other versions that Intel has created.  Newer is not better, and in fact having the newest is usually not recommended.  Do your research on this if you don't have a vendor recommended version.

All links worked as of 12/9/2016.  If there's a broken link, leave a comment about it if you'd like.

ASUS Z87-Plus (OS Install Guide)

Went through another Windows 7 install (gave up on Windows 8.1 .. again) and documented my steps fairly precisely, utilizing/refining on the steps outlined in this [H]ardforum post.

(Work occurred on 7/23/2014)

=--Windows 7 rebuild--=

Asus Z87-Plus motherboard
Creative SBZ audio card
EVGA GTX 760 video
Plextor SSD
Standard HDD (nothing special, just a laptop footprint SATA drive)
 

1.    Windows 7 x64 and reboot

2.    Windows 7 SP1 and reboot

3.    Windows 7 post-SP1 rollup (KB2775511) and reboot

4.    Turn off UAC and reboot

5.    USB3 drivers and reboot

6.    MEI drivers and reboot

7.    Manual* chipset install, to recognize the SMBus controller in device manager.  Reboot

8.    NIC drivers and reboot (you will be asked to set network location first)

9.    Manual* install of IRST drivers, extracted and used against Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller.  Reboot x2 (I had no control over the 2nd reboot, it happened after login following the 1st reboot)

10.  Creative SBZ drivers and reboot

11.  NVidia video drivers and reboot (this will include a .NET 4 install)

12.  Windows updates (118 important updates, 51 optional).  Patching for hours.

13.  Installed SSD specific utility.  In my case, a Plextor drive this time. 

14.  Moved pagefile to non-SSD hard drive, as is routine and recommended. 

15.  Set Windows power plan to High performance.  Set NVidia 3D settings to single display performance mode and prefer maximum performance, which is in line with my configuration.

16.  Followed this guide for tweaking the OS to make it SSD friendly:
http://night-ray.blogspot.com/2012/11/ssd-and-windows-7.html 

17.  Relocated my temp folders to the non-SSD hard drive.

* Manual install meaning I extracted the files from the install packages and manually pointed the unknown devices in Device Manager to these files.  This method avoids unnecessary bloated software that accompanies these packages.

Error logs have been very clean for several days.  Very pleased with this outcome.  Hopefully I realize some level of contentment with my system now. 

The entire hardware build, as shown on a NewEgg wishlist:
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=25353665