I finished building a new desktop and am seeing occasional hangs during basic tasks like opening File Explorer, resuming browsing in Opera GX, typing, and multitasking. Gaming is inconsistent: Valorant, Black Desert Online, and smaller games run normally, but Marvel Rivals has severe microstuttering. The GPU typically sits around 85–95% usage, then drops to roughly 6% whenever a stutter occurs before repeating the cycle. Rebuilding the shaders appeared to make the problem worse. The system uses an RTX 5070, Ryzen 5 7600X3D, Gigabyte B650 Gaming WiFi X AX V2 motherboard with BIOS F42c, 16GB of G.Skill DDR5-6000 memory, a Corsair RM750e 750W PSU, and Windows 11 Pro. I have updated the BIOS, Windows, NVIDIA and AMD chipset drivers, reinstalled various drivers, cleared NVIDIA and DirectX caches, and set the NVIDIA shader cache to unlimited. The operating system is installed on what I believe is a SATA SSD. The issue is intermittent but concerning on a brand-new build. What should I check next?
1 Answer
For the File Explorer and general desktop hangs, first confirm exactly which drive is being used for the C: partition. Since you mentioned it may be a SATA SSD, check that drive's health and performance, and reseat or replace its SATA data and power cables if necessary. A problem with the OS drive could explain both the everyday pauses and some of the game hitching.
The C: drive is the SATA SSD where Windows is installed, as far as I can tell. I’ll check its health and connections first.