Hey everyone! I've been having an issue with my PC lately. About two months ago, it just started slowing down out of nowhere. I recently returned from a month-long vacation, and now I can barely even open a Chrome tab! My setup is solid: I have an RTX 3070 Ti, 16GB of DDR4 3600MHz RAM, an i9-11900K processor, a 500GB Samsung NVMe SSD, a 4TB SATA HDD, and two 256GB M.2 drives that don't seem to do much. My internet is decent too, getting around 300MB on Steam. However, I've noticed my RAM generally idles at around 8GB with 4.9GB cached. I used to play Overwatch 2 smoothly, but now my PC struggles to keep up with basic tasks. I could open multiple game downloads and have 10+ tabs in the past, and now switching tabs feels impossible. I've noticed some issues with iCUE slowing things down as well. Any ideas on what could be going wrong?
1 Answer
First off, check your Task Manager to see if anything is hitting 100% usage. If your HDD or RAM spikes during downloads or gaming, that could hint at a bottleneck. Also, running something like Malwarebytes can help check for any hidden malware using up your resources. You might also want to look into MemTest64 for RAM issues, and ensure your SSD isn't overly full—keeping some free space can help it run better. Plus, make sure your Windows and drivers are fully updated. Sometimes updates can get stuck if you leave your PC for a while.
Yeah, I ran CHKDSK on all my drives, and they seem fine. I'm not out of space either; I have about 120GB free on my SSD. But here’s the kicker: I just discovered I actually have 32GB of RAM, not 16GB! I reseated the sticks and they finally registered properly. They now run at a lower speed too though, around 2133MHz, and I still have 11GB in use while idle, which seems excessive.