New Homebuilt system has horrible performance

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I just built a new system. I'm actually pretty experienced at this, and can typically fix most of the "this isn't working" or "system keeps crashing" type of issues, but this one is a new one to me. Despite decent hardware throughout, this system is performing horrifically slow.

On setup day, I forgot to get Windows 10 installation media ready, so I installed from a Windows 8.1 disc I had laying around and then upgraded to 10 using some installation media I created (I'm an MSDN subscriber so have access to the direct downloads for most Microsoft software.) Now, I didn't use it much when it was 8.1 (about 12 hours), but I used it enough that I felt the performance was really good--since going to 10 it's been horrible.

I subjected the system to some benchmarking using PassMark's "PerformanceTest" and ran all the tests, and yeah...it pretty much came in abysmally, with worse scores than a system using 5+ year old components.

Here are some of the notable discrepancies between my system and the "typical" PassMark scores uploaded by users using the same hardware:

CPU Mark Score
CPU: Intel Core i7-5930K @ 3.50GHz
Typical Score (TS): 13667
My Score (MS): 1420

2D Graphics Mark Score
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
TS: 430-894 range for similar GPUs
MS: 89.1 (couldn't find the typical score for my specific GPU)

3D Graphics Mark
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
TS: 8659
MS: 1540

Memory Mark
Memory: 16GB DDR4 SDRAM PCF-24024
TS: 900-2300 for similar/lower rated ram
MS: 392.8

Disk Mark
Disk: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB
TS: 3000+ (other SSDs)
MS: 2036

I tried to where possible find the exact scores for my hardware but I'm new to messing with this software and their website so wasn't able to find it, but either way, in every single broad category (and all the many subtests I didn't post just for brevity's sake) my system is vastly below the norm. Typically even vastly below much worse hardware, CPUs/GPUs 5+ years ago are getting higher scores on these tests, and my SSD is even slower than some traditional HDDs on score, and the memory rating is lower than all 5 of the "benchmark" memory models Passmark compares against (and all of them are actually slower memory than what I have.) So there must be something systemic that is gravely wrong with this system, but I'm at a complete loss.

Any help would be much appreciated!

 

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Something I wanted to add--while I didn't rigorously benchmark it when it was running Windows 8.1, I should note that the graphics card drivers came with a program called "Ungine Valley Benchmark" which is a 3D benchmarking application that just kinda takes you in an FPS view through a wilderness valley that has a lot of 3D features and etc to test out the system. It ran smooth as butter in 8.1, I don't remember the FPS, but well north of 60, it was basically screaming through it no problems.

When I run that now that the system is running Windows 10, it's a slideshow, struggling to get to 10 fps, and typically running closer to 3-4 fps.

 

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Well, I fixed this and just on the off chance this ever happens to someone else, here is what I did to fix it:

1. I unparked the CPUs, this site has a decent guide on this here.

2. I went into my power settings, and set it to High Performance. By default Windows 10 seems to install with the "balanced" plan, this plan allows the CPU to receive as little as 5% of max power.

3. I updated my nvidia drivers directly from nvidia, the drivers I was running were a few versions out of date and had been downloaded through Windows update right after the Windows 10 install.

4. I changed the pagefile to a set value (4gb) instead of letting windows size it dynamically.

Then I rebooted, and all my Passmark scores were off the charts. Now, which step fixed it? I don't know, I was more concerned with getting my performance than I was finding out specifically what was causing the problem. But I suspect, it was the power plan setting. The "balanced" setting gives a power range of 5 to 100% for the CPU, so in theory when the system needs more power, it should ramp all the way up to 100%. I suspect for some reason Windows wasn't doing that, and it was stuck at 5% no matter what.

The other possibility is the CPUs were stuck in a "parked" state, but in my experience most other systems I've built work fine without doing the manual "hack" to turn off parking entirely, but it is possible for the CPU to stay parked even when it shouldn't be.

While it's always good to have the most up to date drivers direct from nvidia for the GPU, I doubt that was causing my system-wide ultra-low performance.

Finally, since my memory usage was never high enough to utilize the pagefile I'm certain that wasn't the issue, but I've found that generally a static pagefile size is better performance wise than a small one, as long as you're willing to set it appropriately high and not worry about the lost disk space.

Note that during my troubles, my PC's utilization rates were all very low. Never above 20% memory usage, never above 5% CPU usage, CPU never even got warmer during benchmarks. So it was a scenario where despite "needing" more, the system was only using a small sliver of its potential (if you're having performance issues and your memory usage is >80% or CPU usage is high, then you likely have a very different issue than I did.)