Frame drops

_TheWildCat · March 2, 2019

BHello,

I've had this PC I built for about 3 years now and recently some frame drops started happening. They don't occur on all games, so far I have had them happening on GTA V, DiRT 4, CS:GO and BeamNG drive. The way they happen is, let's say you're playing Counter-Strike, I average about 240 fps, then at one point, the fps drops to like 30 and then after a minute shoots back up. Or in GTA V I usually average about 60-65 fps on max settings then at some points it drops to 20fps and after a minute goes back up. That is not due to map loading or anything like that, it happens even when stationary or paused in the menu.

I tried to take off all the overclock I had, that didn't change much except the fps was generally lower.

I was monitoring what gets most usage and I see interesting results, when the frame drop happens, the GPU usage and CPU usage goes down. Let's say I'm playing GTA V, average GPU usage is around 95% and temp 48 degrees, CPU usage is 88% and temps in the normal, then when the drop happens GPU usage drops to 75% and CPU usage to 70%.

Interesting thing I saw was the pagefiles. Well, the pagefile usage is really up there. For some reason the computer uses only 5GB of my 8GB of ram (Gonna be putting to more sticks in soon to get it to 16GB) and then keeps dumping shit in the pagefiles. That causes my poor hard drive (SSD died 2 years ago so only HDD for now) to get 100% usage.

Soon I am going to be upgrading to an SSD and twice the RAM, but I am not sure why suddenly this stuff started happening. Maybe the upgrade will fix the problem, but I'd like to know if I can do something till that happens to not get them lag spikes.

Thank you.