Looking for advice on Custom Windows ISO Stripping and Background Service Elimination for Latency – any experienced users?

Honestly, stripping services off a daily driver tends to backfire more than it helps. I’ve run both a heavily debuilt Windows 11 LTSC image and a stock gaming build on my 9800X3D, and the 1% low delta is usually just 2-4ms, sometimes negative if you nuke a service Windows actually needs. The bigger win is interrupt affinity and core parking. Pin your NIC and GPU interrupts to the P-core cluster on the same NUMA node as your game thread, then disable core parking via powercfg -setacvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_PROCESSOR COREPARK 0. On Zen 4 the CCD0 core is where your X3D lives, so pin game and comms threads there with processlasso – I saw DPC latency drop from ~90µs to ~25µs in LatencyMon.

The timer resolution thing is real. Stock Windows runs the system timer at 15.6ms, which creates scheduling granularity jitter. Drop it to 0.5ms with timerscheduler – frame pacing in CS2 got noticeably smoother and input-to-photon latency tightened by a few ms. For the NIC, turn off interrupt moderation and coalescing in the driver advanced settings; the CPU cost is negligible and you cut RX latency hard. On the Valorant and CS2 side, don’t overthink the debloat – Riot’s and Valve’s server interest management already cull out-of-range entities, so your network stack is mostly handled for you. Just keep your monitor at 1000Hz polling, disable fullscreen optimizations, and trust the stock scheduler over a “tuned” mess.