I recently bought a custom-built gaming PC for €2,700 with a Radeon 9070 XT Nitro+, Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 32GB of DDR5-6000 CL36 memory, and a 1TB P310 SSD. The first couple of days were completely fine, with normal temperatures and reasonable benchmark results. Then, without any obvious change besides installing Steam, Chrome, Discord, and several games, every game began stuttering heavily every few minutes.
The stutter is unusual: the game freezes, briefly resumes for a moment, freezes again, and then continues normally. It happens in Crimson Desert, Rocket League, The Blood of Dawnwalker, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. YouTube videos occasionally stutter too, although much less often, and sometimes the audio glitches at the same time with a brief distorted sound.
I'm running Windows 11. So far I've used DDU to reinstall the AMD drivers, reset Windows completely, removed recently installed programs, checked temperatures on every component, and run sfc /scannow. Nothing has fixed the issue. Does this sound like a hardware, BIOS, driver, or Windows problem, and what else should I test?
1 Answer
Since the issue affects multiple games and even occasionally YouTube, it may not be a problem with any single game. Check the system BIOS settings, especially memory overclocking or other custom changes, and temporarily load the optimized defaults. Then test again on a clean setup. If the stutters remain, document them and use the system warranty rather than spending too long diagnosing a brand-new machine.
The builder asked me to restore the BIOS to its optimized defaults and test a few games, so I’m doing that now. If the stuttering continues, I’ll send the results back and pursue a warranty repair or replacement.