PC has become ridiculously slow

[boltoflightning]

Hey everyone. Recently (August 2019) I built a new PC with a Ryzen 5 3600X, an RTX 2070, and 16GB of RAM. The thermals are perfectly fine, it doesn't have any malware, and I've cleaned a lot of junk off. I make sure to keep it clean, and there is no problem with dust buildup. The past couple weeks, I've noticed a serious slowdown, and have even crashed while playing some games. I have two suspicions: the hard drive and the power supply. The hard drive originally came with a pre-built PC I purchased back in April 2016, and I've also heard some strange clicking sounds, but I dismissed it as not being of concern because my files aren't corrupted, most of my programs and the OS are on a new SSD, and in the disk manager it claims the hard drive is "healthy." It could be a problem with age but I don't see how under 4 years of use would kill a hard drive. The second one is the power supply, simply because when I shut down the PC completely, but don't turn off the power supply directly, it makes a faint buzzing noise. Most sources I've checked have claimed that this is called coil whine and it's normal. Any help is truly appreciated, thank you.

[manikyath]

two pieces of advice here:

- a power supply cant cause slowdown, it either works or it doesnt work. (or it works half assed, and casuses severe crashes)

- use crystaldiskinfo to check your hard drives, windows has no idea...

[RadiatingLight]

3 minutes ago, boltoflightning said:

I don't see how under 4 years of use would kill a hard drive.

Hard drives often die at random, and there are always outliers.

[manikyath]

Just now, RadiatingLight said:

Hard drives often die at random, and there are always outliers.

this.

 

we actually had an entire batch of desktops kick the bucket pretty much simultaniously after 3.5 years because of a fault in the hard drive.

[NineEyeRon]

Is it air or AIO cooled?

[boltoflightning]

7 minutes ago, NineEyeRon said:

Is it air or AIO cooled?

Air cooled, but I've tested it and it has no problems even when pushed hard. I'm having problems now as I'm typing this; I can just feel the lag as I type but I can see the lights in the system actually lagging.

[TrainFan475]

15 minutes ago, boltoflightning said:

and I've also heard some strange clicking sounds

Then it's probably the hard drive

[boltoflightning]

27 minutes ago, manikyath said:

this.

 

we actually had an entire batch of desktops kick the bucket pretty much simultaniously after 3.5 years because of a fault in the hard drive.

So I found a program called gsmartcontrol, which might not be a great program, but it showed that the older hard drive has had errors in the past but not recently. It also said that all 3 (2 HDD 1 SSD) were all good.

[boltoflightning]

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

two pieces of advice here:

- a power supply cant cause slowdown, it either works or it doesnt work. (or it works half assed, and casuses severe crashes)

- use crystaldiskinfo to check your hard drives, windows has no idea...

I decided to actually dig into my PC and test the hard drives individually. I unplugged both and the whole system ran beautifully, and then plugged one of the hard drives back in and acheived the same performance. I've found the faulty hard drive, so I guess I'll have to remove it. Thank you, everyone, for all the help.

[Ben17]

4 minutes ago, boltoflightning said:

I decided to actually dig into my PC and test the hard drives individually. I unplugged both and the whole system ran beautifully, and then plugged one of the hard drives back in and acheived the same performance. I've found the faulty hard drive, so I guess I'll have to remove it. Thank you, everyone, for all the help.

np

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, boltoflightning said:

Hey everyone. Recently (August 2019) I built a new PC with a Ryzen 5 3600X, an RTX 2070, and 16GB of RAM. The thermals are perfectly fine, it doesn't have any malware, and I've cleaned a lot of junk off. I make sure to keep it clean, and there is no problem with dust buildup. The past couple weeks, I've noticed a serious slowdown, and have even crashed while playing some games. I have two suspicions: the hard drive and the power supply. The hard drive originally came with a pre-built PC I purchased back in April 2016, and I've also heard some strange clicking sounds, but I dismissed it as not being of concern because my files aren't corrupted, most of my programs and the OS are on a new SSD, and in the disk manager it claims the hard drive is "healthy." It could be a problem with age but I don't see how under 4 years of use would kill a hard drive. The second one is the power supply, simply because when I shut down the PC completely, but don't turn off the power supply directly, it makes a faint buzzing noise. Most sources I've checked have claimed that this is called coil whine and it's normal. Any help is truly appreciated, thank you.

Does your CPU pull more power than the one it replaced?

 

There are some people who buy MB's that have an EPS12V and an additional 4pin and leave off the 4pin power because their PSU doesn't have it, which is fine for a lower-tier CPU in theory. In practice, typically anything involving power should be connected, even if you don't need it since it's better safe than sorry.

 

That's the only situation where the "PSU" would make something run slower, is that a power limiter is being applied due to insufficient power. GPU's are expected to do this since they have fixed cooling designs. CPU's not so much.

 

Coil whine while off is a minor concern, but more typical of cheaply designed PSU's.  The Hard drive is fairly unlikely to be the issue unless it's a mechanical drive (eg with bad sectors) or a SSD with >50% of it's capacity and 50% of it's durability worn. SSD's typically have a life span and speed are reduced if the drive is kept full. You should try to keep 20% of the SSD free if at all possible at all time. Most SSD's slow down due to the memory on the controller being filled, so you'll see something like a 1GB file transfer instantly, and then take 5-20 seconds to copy.

 

I once managed to drag a SSD-equipped server to it's knees simply by using rsync to make a backup. SSD's HATE small files, so it will use up the entire write cache before it finishes writing to the drive, making the OS panic and start... page swapping.

 

[boltoflightning]

11 hours ago, Kisai said:

Does your CPU pull more power than the one it replaced?

 

There are some people who buy MB's that have an EPS12V and an additional 4pin and leave off the 4pin power because their PSU doesn't have it, which is fine for a lower-tier CPU in theory. In practice, typically anything involving power should be connected, even if you don't need it since it's better safe than sorry.

 

That's the only situation where the "PSU" would make something run slower, is that a power limiter is being applied due to insufficient power. GPU's are expected to do this since they have fixed cooling designs. CPU's not so much.

 

Coil whine while off is a minor concern, but more typical of cheaply designed PSU's.  The Hard drive is fairly unlikely to be the issue unless it's a mechanical drive (eg with bad sectors) or a SSD with >50% of it's capacity and 50% of it's durability worn. SSD's typically have a life span and speed are reduced if the drive is kept full. You should try to keep 20% of the SSD free if at all possible at all time. Most SSD's slow down due to the memory on the controller being filled, so you'll see something like a 1GB file transfer instantly, and then take 5-20 seconds to copy.

 

I once managed to drag a SSD-equipped server to it's knees simply by using rsync to make a backup. SSD's HATE small files, so it will use up the entire write cache before it finishes writing to the drive, making the OS panic and start... page swapping.

 

I appreciate your response, but the problem has (thankfully) been resolved with minor work. The CPU has appropriate power, and the wiring is done as necessary. The PSU isn’t cheap; I forget the 80 plus rating on it but it is pretty high up. Funnily enough, my off brand one that came with a prebuilt didn’t have this issue, but things could be worse. Thank you for the help :)