Good hardware, poor performance?

johnb35 said:

If the onboard video was also doing the same thing then it appears its something else. Video cards can be bad from the beginning. This could be anywhere from software or other hardware causing this. You could check your power supply to make sure its outputting good power and the right voltages.

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How can I check my power supply?

Also, I should mention that I've recently been seeing a lot of artifacts and bad textures while gaming in fallout 4. I'm not sure if that's relevant, but maybe it indicates the GPU being an issue more-so than software. If it is a software issue though, that would be a huge relief.

Artifacts are either a video card or power supply issue, but usually the video card. I would still get your power supply checked though. They do make power supply testers but its only a general test and not under load.

somebody480 said:

but I read up before that peerblock is more of a feel-good program than it offers any kind of protection

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It's just like a firewall. It's all what it is. One should use a VPN if you use torrents anyway. I use a VPN and Peerblock.

For the benefit of anyone that comes across this thread:

I may or may not have discovered that I never actually connected my HDD directly to my power supply (I assume it was just running off the motherboard somehow). Boot-up times are now down to less than a minutes, maybe 30-secondsish.