Systemwide lagging and CPU stuttering

[yep123]

I've post about this on Toms Hardware forum but no one is responding so I thought I'd post here. I'm just going to copy paste what I exactly said in my original post

 

About a month ago my CPU fan just started ramping up at the smallest tasks and every game I played would run normally with the CPU fan a lot louder than it used to be, but there would be frequent FPS drops and stuttering. The only thing that could have caused this was me changing the priority of Star Wars: Fallen Order in Task Manager, because this lag never happened before I did this. I've ran stress tests over and over for the past month, no CPU, PSU, GPU, disk problems (the only problem was with my external drive dying which I've gotten rid of), no viruses, no corrupted files (I do a sfcscan every few weeks), no cryptominers, no physical damage, no dust (I've cleaned my computer multiple times), switched my memory from 1 3 to 2 4 slots. Simple programs like Discord that never lagged before are now freezing up when I try to scroll up in a chat, opening Chrome makes all audio freeze and the cursor stutter all across the screen. Please help, I don't want to buy new parts. All my temps are normal and there seems to be no thermal throttling of any time. I've reseated the CPU and its cooler with new thermal paste twice already, but no fix. I've narrowed the problem down to software and something to do with power plan/power settings. I reset my power plan to its defaults, and the lag and CPU fan ramping up and down seems to stop for a little bit, but after use it comes back but not as worse as before. Could anyone help me figure out to fix this? The last resort I know of is reinstalling Windows fresh, but I have a lot of personal files and it would be a pain reinstalling everything

[KnightSirius]

Whenever I encounter problems like this where you throw everything you can think of at it to no avail I just assume it's windows crippling itself as usual, nuke it and reinstall.

A good way to check if it's a program or service running that is causing this try booting in safe mode and looking for the issues you are seeing (lagging/stutter/CPU Fan ramping up and down). If you don't see it occur in a reasonable time frame where you normally would then it's likely something installed and/or running in the background causing it.

Narrowing it down is tedious and difficult, you can start manually shutting down services and waiting to see if the symptoms disappear.

Another interesting option, if you can create a bootable linux thumbdrive, and just manually boot from that through the BIOS; play around for a bit and see if you can replicate the issue there. If you can't then that points again towards some sort of software/background service causing problems.

[yep123]

On 6/29/2020 at 12:33 AM, KnightSirius said:

Whenever I encounter problems like this where you throw everything you can think of at it to no avail I just assume it's windows crippling itself as usual, nuke it and reinstall.

A good way to check if it's a program or service running that is causing this try booting in safe mode and looking for the issues you are seeing (lagging/stutter/CPU Fan ramping up and down). If you don't see it occur in a reasonable time frame where you normally would then it's likely something installed and/or running in the background causing it.

Narrowing it down is tedious and difficult, you can start manually shutting down services and waiting to see if the symptoms disappear.

Another interesting option, if you can create a bootable linux thumbdrive, and just manually boot from that through the BIOS; play around for a bit and see if you can replicate the issue there. If you can't then that points again towards some sort of software/background service causing problems.

I tried a clean boot and everything seemed to be fine for the first couple hours of use but the usual CPU fan rpm spiking and systemwide lag came back, is there anything else you could think of to suggest before I reinstall Windows cause it would be a pain to do so because I have a ton of personal files and videos

[KnightSirius]

49 minutes ago, yep123 said:

I tried a clean boot and everything seemed to be fine for the first couple hours of use but the usual CPU fan rpm spiking and systemwide lag came back, is there anything else you could think of to suggest before I reinstall Windows cause it would be a pain to do so because I have a ton of personal files and videos

Honestly, not many ideas coming to mind for this one. The issue persisting in safe mode is a real curve ball. I'd give the Linux off a stick a shot because Linux is so stable compared to windows that if that runs fine at least you know for certain it's not a hardware issue. It's not too difficult to do, just grab the latest version of Ubuntu then download Rufus and create a bootable drive with any spare thumbdrive. Boot manually from the thumbdrive through the BIOS and just don't install it to your system just click on "try ubuntu" instead. You can browse the internet for a few hours if nothing else as firefox comes preinstalled.

Also, what are your system specs for reference? Could be useful.

[yep123]

8 hours ago, KnightSirius said:

Honestly, not many ideas coming to mind for this one. The issue persisting in safe mode is a real curve ball. I'd give the Linux off a stick a shot because Linux is so stable compared to windows that if that runs fine at least you know for certain it's not a hardware issue. It's not too difficult to do, just grab the latest version of Ubuntu then download Rufus and create a bootable drive with any spare thumbdrive. Boot manually from the thumbdrive through the BIOS and just don't install it to your system just click on "try ubuntu" instead. You can browse the internet for a few hours if nothing else as firefox comes preinstalled.

Also, what are your system specs for reference? Could be useful.

My specs are an i5-7500, EVGA GTX 1070, 16 GB 2666 mhz RAM, 1 TB HDD. I'm most certain that it isn't a hardware problem because all my temps are as normal as they can get. although I have noticed that my CPU temps are like 5 degrees C hotter than before