Realtek drivers causing system-wide stuttering

[DoctorSlurpy]

I've been having this problem for a while and I've just now figured out something that gives me some hope of finding a solution.

I just saw a thread here that appeared somewhat similar at first, but it was not the same issue.

I recently upgraded about half of my components. 

 

Current specs are:

*Gigabyte Aorus X470 Ultimate Gaming

*AMD Ryzen 2700X

*16Gb Corsair Ram (2x8GB) at 3000MHz

EVGA GTX 970

*Cooler Master 650W 80+ Gold Power Supply

256GB Adata sata SSD

Gigabyte wifi card

1TB Western Digital sata HDD

Windows 10 Home 64

(* means its part of the upgrade)

 

Since the upgrade, I have had a few issues. 

I had random crashes happening which seem to have been solved by a fresh Windows install.

The motherboard splash screen has been taking progressively longer and longer (now consistently at 2 minutes, haven't gotten around to trying to figure out this issue yet)

System-wide stuttering, which is what this thread is about.

 

The stuttering happens consistently a few minutes after booting, and often coming out of sleep mode.

It *almost* always happens (about 90% of wakes), but there have been a few random boots that it hasn't, so those days I try my best to not put it in sleep mode or shut it down until necessary.

It happens no matter what I am doing.

It is constant and regular, timed sort of like a heart beat.  A second or so passes, then two stutters in fairly rapid succession, another second passes, then two more, repeating.

It affects audio and video.  Video just seems to pause for a moment, audio sometimes pauses for a moment, sometimes pops, and sometimes does that weird glitch thing where it sounds like it repeats a single millisecond like 10 times, then continues.

After scouring the internet, I finally found someone with a somewhat similar (but not exact) issue, saying that theirs was caused by the Realtek HD audio driver.

I went into the device manager, and uninstalled the one that says "Realtek Digital Output (Realtek(R) Audio)"

Lo and behold, after waiting about 2 minutes for it to uninstall, the moment it got done, the stuttering stopped.

It seems that the base audio drivers built into windows function fine for now and audio outputs normally after doing this, but of course, on boot, or upon clicking 'detect hardware changes', the driver reappears and the stuttering is back in full force.

I suspect it is possibly due to a conflict between the Realtek and Nvidia Audio drivers.

What can I try for a long term fix?

 

Edit: I have upgraded my BIOS to the latest version, to no avail, and have tried updating other motherboard and chipset related drivers