Bizarre Laptop performance drops.

[Wade.black90]

I'm going to preface my issues with some background of my computer experience and apologize for such a long post.

 

I've been building gaming computers since the late 90s and have fairly extensive experience and knowledge from messing with hardware and software as well as going to school for Cisco IT, what I've run into with my laptop is nothing I've experienced before and google has no solutions for me.

 

I own an MSI GS63vr 6rf that I purchased new in 2017. The laptop has worked flawlessly since day one, except for running rather hot (which is expected) during heavy gaming use. Finally after almost 5 years of ownership, the battery went out on me. The laptop would indicate 100% battery while plugged in, and as soon as the plug is removed, the battery dies. IFixit has battery kits for fairly cheap so I decided to restore my trusty gaming laptop rather than shopping for a new one and I wasn't too keen on being limited to being plugged in. 

 

So I ordered a new batter, and while I was researching how to replace the battery, I decided it was probably a good idea to upgrade some internal components while I would have the laptop open in roughly a weeks time. The main limiting factors i've had over the last year or two have been how large modern video games have gotten so storage has been scarce recently. The laptop came stock with a 256gb m.2 SSD as well as a 1TB HDD so I ordered a 1TB Samsung 980 NVMe drive to replace my primary drive, and a Samsung 870 EVO 2TB SSD to replace my secondary storage drive. Both seemed like a great upgrade that would boost my computers performance even just a little bit while giving me more space. After 5 years of fairly steady use, knowing the laptop would be disassembled completely to replace the drives, I figured now would be a good time to replace the thermal paste with some better performance and new paste from Thermal Grizzly and some replacement fans (I had a weird fan noise 6 months back I had taken apart to 'Fix' and figured I'd go ahead and replace them)

 

So finally the day came when all my parts had arrived from various online stores. I spent a week slowly backing everything up I wanted to keep that wasn't stored on the cloud somewhere to a couple flash drives and went ahead and made myself a windows boot drive with the windows creation tool so I could pop the new hard drives in and get right to installing windows and my brand new completely clean SSD's. I wasn't really interested in cloning my drives because I wanted a fresh start after 5 years, so I take the laptop apart, install all my new parts, reassemble the laptop, it takes a good 5 seconds of black screen for the bios to register the new hardware and proceed to boot options. Windows 10 installs to my new m.2 drive faster than I could have imagined and I was in my new desktop within the hour. I format the new 2tb spare drive, installed all necessary drivers, uninstalled anything I didn't want that windows throws at you, configured all my privacy settings, and got the nvidia drivers for my GTX 1060 and from there proceeded to install all the games I wanted from steam and this is where things get weird.

 

Before reformatting and installing new drives, my computer ran everything from Star Wars KOTOR I & II, star wars Jedi Fallen Order, Fallout 4, Skyrim, Age of Empires Difinitive Editions, Borderlands 2, Battlefield 4, basically any game I've installed on my computer, it's had no trouble running. Now after "upgrading" my computer, none of my old star wars games boot. Age of empires 1 is unplayable with the amount of lag. age of empires 2 runs really well but crashes halfway through each game. age of empires 3 is unplayable from lag. jedi fallen order (the newest game and most demanding thus far) runs flawlessly, virtually zero lag at high settings. So after having no idea what just happened, I used the built in windows factory reset recovery tool. Start from scratch again, install all my drivers and programs and again, same outcome.

 

So I research for a few days and find no one who has had the same issues as I have online. So I decide to use my windows boot drive and completely wipe the drives and start from scratch like I was 3 days ago. This time I install the "necessary" drivers and leave a couple drivers at default (I'm looking at you Nvidia Geforce 471.11) without updating my geforce nvidia drivers, SW Kotor I & II both launch finally, but Kotor 1 runs smooth, and Kotor 2 lags so much that it's unplayable. So I update to the 471.11 driver and like I figured, that driver bricks both old games (they crash immediately upon launch) and from there I test out my other games. Age of empires 3: unplayable, age of empires 2: playable with crashing halfway through each game, age of empires 1: unplayable. fallout 4: unplayable, jedi fallen order: runs flawlessly, sins of a solar empire: runs flawlessly, SW The Old Republic: runs flawlessly, Dead Space 1: unplayable, Dead Space 3: runs flawlessly. 

 

From there I upgrade my ram going from 2x8gb sticks to 2x16 gb sticks and I have seen zero performance increases. 

 

So after that long winded attempt at explaining my situation, I'm wondering if upgrading SSD's can hurt performance, everything I see online (and from my own experience in the gaming desktop scene) SSD's boost performance in every way. but what I'm experiencing with my Laptop is unmitigated madness that I don't understand.

 

Thanks for anyone who actually takes the time to read this through.