Stuttering

Jamarlie · May 13, 2021

Yo, so about a month ago my PC started having his first small stutters. The mouse would freeze for a split second or video would freeze up while watching Netflix every now and again. I wasn't really all too worried until the BSODs started coming, 3 in a month, error code always was "DPC Watchdog Violation".

I did a couple things already like checking my RAM, diagnosis tool says no errors. I ran chkdsk, fixed a few errors, stuttering was still there. I checked temps, under full load it's 55°C non OC (specs are listed below), Crystaldisk reports no errors, however it did show me in one instance that my SSD was 50°C hot, that was pretty unusual considering my HDDs are around 20°C less than that right below it. I updated all the drivers for my GPU and around the PC, nothing. I then went on and completely reinstalled Windows, and it did get a little better but it still persists. I have stretches like the last 3 hours with now spikes, but when I booted it up earlier today I had a spike every other minute. I was now starting to narrow the problem down a bit and think (and still hope lol) it's just the SSD.

Samsung's SSD Magician doesn't seem to help all too much, my SSD according to that thing is fine? That is despite the fact the SSD had some weird issues a few weeks back where I opened a folder and it would take about 10 seconds to display its contents one by one. I presume it's gotta do something with it. Considering it was never running above 50% capacity and it wasn't a cache or something handling massive amounts of data, it can't be the flash memory on it. The flash memory itself has only 20TB written to it out of 100TB it's rated for, but it's about 4 years old at this point.

So my working theory now is that my SSD controller might just be dying atm.

My system was built around mid 2016, except for the GPU which is like 3 years old?
Here are the specs

i7 4790K @ 4.00Ghz cooled by custom water loop
16GB HyperX Fury RAM

Asus Sabertooth MARK S Z97 Mainboard

EVGA GTX 1070 FTW

be quiet Pure Power 9 600W PSU

Boot OS is Windows 10 Pro on a Samsung 750 EVO

So I ordered a new SSD now, but still I'm unsure if I'm in the right with my diagnosis?
Which is where you guys come in. Maybe, just as a sanity check, do you guys think it's the SSD as well or is it maybe something I haven't thought of yet?

Thanks for the answers and reading through all of this in the first place!

Chris Pratt · May 13, 2021

Stuttering like that isn't going to be drive related, unless maybe you don't have enough RAM and it's paging to the drive. Otherwise, the drive isn't going to be really actively doing stuff during much of the things you mentioned.

Temps are one thing, but your CPU could still just not be enough to handle the tasks at hand. The 4790K is getting a little long in the tooth, but I'd still expect it to be able to handle the tasks you mentioned. However, depending on what other processes are running and what they're doing, may be not. What's you CPU utilization look like?

Jamarlie · May 13, 2021

46 minutes ago, Chris Pratt said:

Stuttering like that isn't going to be drive related, unless maybe you don't have enough RAM and it's paging to the drive. Otherwise, the drive isn't going to be really actively doing stuff during much of the things you mentioned.

Temps are one thing, but your CPU could still just not be enough to handle the tasks at hand. The 4790K is getting a little long in the tooth, but I'd still expect it to be able to handle the tasks you mentioned. However, depending on what other processes are running and what they're doing, may be not. What's you CPU utilization look like?

Well the BSODs happened when I was playing games, other than that Chrome is hogging about 20% of the CPU and it still stutters there. I wasn't really thinking about the CPU at all tbh since I've always heard about how long you can use CPUs before they die.
New CPU would be kind of the worst case scenario since that means new Motherboard + RAM which has me looking at at least 700 bucks.

The SSD was also my focus since I read online that the Watchdog Violation and stutters sometimes come from the drive and the OS? So that was why I was assuming that, along with the weird file loading issue I had and the high temp spike I saw.

Edit: Idk how useful this is but I used CPU-Z to bench my CPU and it tells me my Single Thread rating is 97.6% of what the CPU should be at and my Multi Thread is hovering around 94.4% of what the average benchmark says.

Jamarlie · May 13, 2021

And I just got yet another bluescreen, again a DPC Watchdog Violation. Starting to lose it a bit here. This time my CPU was at a constant 15% usage which I know, because I had the resource monitor open

Jamarlie · May 15, 2021

So, I investigated and found the issue, it was not my SSD, but not my CPU either.

So for future reference here is what I did:
I went to the event logger to check the system error, DPC_Watchdog_Violation.
I downloaded the WinDbg App and opened the minidump of the latest BSOD in C:/Windows/Minidump/

I analyzed the dump using the tool and found that the reason my PC crashed was
"FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: 0x133_DPC_gwdrv!unknown_function"

gwdrv.sys as a driver had failed.
gwdrv.sys is the Glasswire driver.
Come to think of it my crashes started right around the time I got Glasswire again, so THAT was the cause of these random BSODs.
I uninstalled it obviously. If anyone has the same problem go check on those dump files.