PC Games Randomly Stutter

[Twisted4000]

I've had this problem for a VERY long time now, and now it's just ridiculous, and it's pissing me off.

My PC games... it doesn't really matter which one I play... stutter. Live every 20 seconds or so, the game will freeze for about a second, then go back to normal. Sometimes it will be a few seconds. Sometimes it'll freeze more often. Sometimes less often.

What's the problem? Could I at least get a response? I've posted a message like this on several other forums multiple times, and I did not get a single response. Let's try again.

I used to have the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT, which also had the same exact problem, but just today I swapped it out with the NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450, and yes, new drivers installed and up-to-date, old drivers uninstalled. DirectX 11 downloaded and installed. Temperatures are fine. GPU idles at about 40C, on load goes no higher than 60C. My CPU idles at about 40C and loads at 55C.

My hard drives stick around 37C. I have two. My case is a mid ATX, has 1x 120mm intake fan in the front, 1x 120mm outtake fan in the back, and 1x 120mm intake fan on the side panel. PSU has independent cooling.

Case is free of dust. PSU is fine, CPU is fine, GPU is fine. All latest drivers installed.

If you want my specs, read my signature below.

I suspected the issue to be coming from my hard drive, but I used chkdsk with command prompt and it did not find any bad sectors or anything. I used a 3rd party program and did a S.M.A.R.T. test. Everything's fine. What is causing my games to stutter? Any ideas? Anyone?

 

[Wildcard]

Hi,

Two things that I can think of you can try. The first is to scan your RAM to see if any are giving errors. Bad ram can cause freezes, reboots, random shutdowns, and not let the pc boot. If you havent done so already, I would try running memtest 86 or the windows memory test and let them run for a while to see if an errors are found. If there are, then that is a sign the ram is bad. If you have another computer that uses the same kind of ram, try swapping them out and see if that makes a difference as well. You may also want to run a stress test on your processor to see if that is the cause. Try running prime 95 on it, if it calculates something incorrectly that is a sign that it is damages.

The other thing that might be causing it could be your audio hardware. When I first played ghost recon, it would freeze every few seconds. I found that it was my audio device causing the problem. I disabled sound hardware accelleration in dxdiag and that resolved the issue. I'm not sure if you can do that in windows 7, but updating audio hardware drivers and maybe lowering audio settings in the game to as low as possible or choose software mode instead of hardware in the game and see if that makes any kind of difference.

 

[Twisted4000]

Hi,

Two things that I can think of you can try. The first is to scan your RAM to see if any are giving errors. Bad ram can cause freezes, reboots, random shutdowns, and not let the pc boot. If you havent done so already, I would try running memtest 86 or the windows memory test and let them run for a while to see if an errors are found. If there are, then that is a sign the ram is bad. If you have another computer that uses the same kind of ram, try swapping them out and see if that makes a difference as well. You may also want to run a stress test on your processor to see if that is the cause. Try running prime 95 on it, if it calculates something incorrectly that is a sign that it is damages.

The other thing that might be causing it could be your audio hardware. When I first played ghost recon, it would freeze every few seconds. I found that it was my audio device causing the problem. I disabled sound hardware accelleration in dxdiag and that resolved the issue. I'm not sure if you can do that in windows 7, but updating audio hardware drivers and maybe lowering audio settings in the game to as low as possible or choose software mode instead of hardware in the game and see if that makes any kind of difference.

Thanks for the reply, and thank you for all of the solutions you gave me. I'll try every one out.

For one thing, yesterday, I ordered a new motherboard, this one is a mid ATX rather than a micro ATX, plus it uses DDR3 RAM instead of DDR2, so I'll have completely new RAM.

If it's the RAM's fault, it won't really matter anymore.