First the bad - I always like to get the bad out of the way. I've already had to install the OS twice. Why? Mainly because OCD, but the issue was one which was never going to go away properly if I didn't, and there's absolutely no way I will tolerate a bad install from the outset - who would!?. The crux of that issue was not the OS (for a change?) but was in fact the Asus AURA software, and Asus.. I'm talking to you now.. I love your mainboards but you truly deserve to get thrown under a bus.. no, several buses for the lacklustre, piece of s**t RGB control program you've handed to the world.
Fortunately for me I was never that bothered about having a plethora of RGB devices all glowing in a distracting and gaudy fashion, preferrring the more relaxing subtlety of maybe a little glow from the mainboard, supported by solid ambient lighting from the case fans. Indeed that is what I find myself with! Nevertheless I did entertain the notion of having their software on board to exercise some control over the minimal lighting present. Sadly the most recent version, whilst capable of actually running, could neither see the mainboard, successfully reflect upon its transgression by way of any forum solutions nor actually uninstall after a later, second attempt, reporting a "catastrophic error" instead. Not wishing to give up easily I also tried the various available incarnations - the remainder threw up all over the screen listing an X99 error of some form in a hastily opened web browser, and did little else except report another vague problem which wouldn't even let the software run in its greyed out incompetence. How did something this bad get out in the wild, much less sit at the heart of their marketing campaign? Judging by the 24-plus pages on the ROG forum detailing many and varied ill-fated efforts to use this crappy code, I would heartily suggest to Asus that they pull all the marketing for this, get back to the drawing board, return with good software and a handful of apologies in at least 150 differing languages prepared well in advance, and in the interim celebrate what they do well. The boards are great, Asus AURA less so.. With that in mind I shall remain my usual stoic self and enjoy the rainbow glance intertwined about my graphics card, considering it to be as representative of Lain's glowing heart as much as it might be a reminder to me that I need to tear a strip off any Asus representative I might encounter.
Now for the good.
In spite of the usual abomination that is known as the installation process for Windows 10 (it can't help itself) I can report nothing less than what I would call blisteringly fast install times from a USB 3.0 boot stick to NVMe. We are talking legendary by comparison to that which I've known in the past. Having done this twice already I can confirm that from "go" to "working desktop" takes around 8 mins, give or take a little buggering about with options on the fly. Booting up in as little as 12 seconds even without any BIOS tweaks, this is by far the niftiest I've ever seen Windows move and massively faster than anything ever witnessed in this home.
NVMe SSD performance is undoubtedly a worthy champion with its credentials intact, and for a change it's nice to say an actual congratulations to Samsung for delivering what it says on the tin. Clicking through the OS from pillar to post happens without the system batting an eyelid. Wonderful! It also explains how I was able to install, bugger about with, learn from and reinstall in about three hours, without any harm to self or society at large.
With a few things learned about what is worthy and what is best left to rot in the digital sunshine, I'm confident that I'm going to have a very wholesome computing experience in the near future. For tonight it's left to me to dodge Asus AURA and move swiftly on to reinstalling the chipset and system drivers, uninstall the ropey Windows video driver variant in favour of the REAL nVidia 1070 driver, and perform all those little tweaks and pokes in order to get for myself a first, basic, almost vanilla image down to external HDD (with a little Chrome inserted into the mix - I would never consider Edge or IE to be worthy browsers to have out of the box, should a quick restore be required.). From thereon it should just be a matter of pruning the software I haven't been using over the months and get the ones I do use into proper order. A swift tidy up of the external HDD will also be in order once the survivors of the pruning, software and documents alike, have been ascertained.
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