About five days ago, my PC nearly froze while I was playing a game. The frame rate dropped to a slideshow, Windows became mostly unresponsive, and I had to hold the power button to shut it down. It booted normally afterward, but performance has been dramatically worse ever since.
Games that used to load in 10–20 seconds now take several minutes, even when installed on different SSDs. Windows menus occasionally stutter, games hitch when loading new assets, and even lightweight titles can take around a minute to start. CPU usage often reaches nearly 100% during loading while the reported clock remains around 4.4–4.6 GHz. Temperatures, memory usage, SSD health, and benchmark results appear normal, and the GPU behaves about as it did before the problem. Some games also appear to recompile shaders every time they launch.
The system has a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 32 GB of DDR5-5600 memory, an X870 Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice motherboard, a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, and two SSDs. I have already tried reinstalling Windows, using DDU and reinstalling graphics drivers, updating the BIOS and chipset drivers, running SFC, DISM, chkdsk, memory diagnostics, SSD tests, clean boot, Safe Mode, BIOS defaults, enabling and disabling XMP, checking temperatures, moving games between drives, and disconnecting unnecessary peripherals. The issue remains on a fresh Windows installation without the antivirus software installed.
I have not yet replaced or reseated hardware, investigated the power supply, or thoroughly checked motherboard and voltage-related sensors. HWiNFO appears to indicate some kind of external CPU throttling despite normal CPU temperatures. What should I check next, and could the motherboard, VRM, chipset, PSU, or secondary SSD be responsible?
3 Answers
Automatic virtual memory is generally the right setting, and 5 GB by itself does not explain this kind of system-wide slowdown with 32 GB of RAM. Keep the page file system-managed on the Windows drive unless you find a specific error. The more useful next step is monitoring effective CPU clocks, CPU package power, GPU utilization, disk response time, and motherboard limit flags during an actual loading hitch rather than only checking temperatures or Task Manager's advertised clock speed.
The HWiNFO result sounds more like an external throttle than normal CPU thermal throttling. If the CPU temperature is fine but a limit flag is active, the motherboard may be deliberately restricting the processor because of a VRM, chipset, power, or firmware condition. Check the CPU Performance Limit Reasons and motherboard sensor readings while reproducing the problem. Pay particular attention to VRM and chipset temperatures, power-limit flags, and whether the CPU package power or effective clock is dropping. Since the BIOS was updated recently, load optimized defaults again and verify that no unusual limits or tuning settings were carried over.
The unexplained second SSD is still worth testing. Disconnect it physically and run a game installed on the primary drive. A failing drive can cause long asset-loading pauses without showing constant 100% usage, especially if the system is repeatedly waiting on read errors or retries. Check the Windows Event Viewer for disk, storahci, stornvme, or controller errors rather than relying only on SMART health and a short benchmark.
The drive temperatures look normal, and moving the games between drives did not change the behavior, but I have not yet tested with the secondary SSD completely disconnected.
That matches what I am seeing: the indicator points to an external throttle rather than the CPU itself. I am going to investigate the VRM and chipset sensors and review the BIOS settings again.