My computer freezes or hiccups for less than a second about once every minute or two. It is barely noticeable during normal Windows use, but very distracting in games. Performance is otherwise good, with a Ryzen 5 8400F, 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, an RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB, and about 2.5 TB of SSD storage. I suspected a software or graphics-driver problem and reinstalled the GPU drivers, but the stuttering continued. There are no mechanical drives or USB storage devices connected, only peripherals such as a keyboard and mouse. Temperatures also appear normal while gaming. What else should I check?
2 Answers
Check temperatures and utilization while the problem is happening, rather than only checking them afterward. A brief CPU, GPU, disk, or background-process spike could explain the hitch even when average temperatures look fine. Recording frametimes with a monitoring tool may also help identify whether this is a system-wide pause or just a game-specific frame-time spike.
Since both storage drives are SSDs and there is no external USB storage involved, a mechanical-drive or USB-storage delay is unlikely to be the cause. It may be worth monitoring Task Manager or a hardware-monitoring tool during a stutter to see whether CPU usage, disk activity, memory usage, or a background process spikes at the same time.
The only USB devices connected are my keyboard and mouse, and both drives are SSDs, so storage seems less likely. I’ll watch the system graphs while gaming to look for a spike.
I tested it while running Control, and the temperatures looked normal. I’ll still monitor utilization and frametimes during the actual hiccups.