Strange split second stutter/audio drop. Possible curse.

SamboStrand · June 23, 2017

Hey all, I have been having suffering with a strange unidentifiable issue for the past few months. In all I have pretty much built 3 machines in this time and all of which have suffered the same problem.

It all started after the pre patch just before the Windows 10 Creators update landed and has continued ever since. My build at the time was a Asus VIII Hero Alpha, 6700K and a GTX 1080 Gaming X. I mainly play Final Fantasy XIV (it does affect other games) and noticed that during game play it would for only a split second drop the sound and freeze/frame skip but would be fine after that. I have not noticed any particular pattern as it can be fine for hours with no problem, sometimes only 15 minutes into game play and some days no problem at all. After replacing the PSU, GPU, motherboard, SSD, Ram and cpu, doing a fresh Windows install as well as complete up to date driver check and I was hoping it would be fine.. but alas the problem persisted. In the end I sold the machine off taking a huge loss and decided to build another new PC this time from scratch.

My new PC build which now has a Asus IX Formula, 7700K, 32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum ram, Asus Strix 1080 TI and a 1000W Platinum rated PSU is now ALSO having the same problem... I am so frustrated as I have no idea what is causing it and everything is brand new, even the monitor and sound system, I am even plugged into a different mains socket. I have literally tried everything from installing recent drivers, updated motherboard bios to the latest and installed any recent windows updates. This build is barely two weeks old and already it's bugging the hell out of me and feels like some sort or curse!

As you can imagine desperation has kicked in for any sort of a solution to this issue, help is greatly appreciated!