stutter Games stuttering when playing.

[FastByte17]

Hello everyone,

 

I am troubleshooting a problem for my friend. He's recently been experiencing stutters (FPS Drops) when he's playing Fortnite or any other game. His specs are more than enough for what he's playing so hardware doesn't seem to be the issue. I ran anti-virus and found 3 malwares which were then quarantined by the anti-virus. All the junk files (temporary files/software cache) was removed using Ccleaner. All the drivers are up-to-date. All the unnecessary start-up programs are disabled. I am not sure anymore what's causing this issue.

 

Here are his specs:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900

RAM: 32 GB HyperX DDR4-3200 XMP RGB SDRAM (2 x 16GB)

Storage: 1 TB WD Black PCIe NVMe TLC M.2 -SSD

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070

Monitor: Samsung Odyssey G7 32” 240Hz

 

Any help is appreciated

 

Thank You!

[FastByte17]

1 minute ago, IAmNotASmartMan said:

Could it be thermal throttling?

The CPU does reach 100% when playing. He showed me from the task manager. The PC was bought from the store. It is not custom-made.

[FastByte17]

5 minutes ago, IAmNotASmartMan said:

Glad his CPU is working well, the thermal throttling would occur if the heat of the chip gets too high. They're smart, so to protect themselves from very damaging heat levels, they'll step down their workload, thus producing less heat. This would be indicative of an issue with the cooling, not the CPU.

Personally I use Piriform Speccy but there are lots of other options, probably much better ones, to monitor the temperature sensors. You could get him to open this, play his game, then when he starts experiencing the stutters to Alt Tab out to check on the CPU/GPU temp graphs. If it has been hitting the 90's, then dropping suddenly, the CPU has probably started thermal throttling to protect itself. Not sure of the GPU temps, about mid eighties depending on the card it seems.

The solution there would be to either improve cooling, or, lower the demand on the CPU through game settings like render range or particle complexity.

Alright I will tell him to download that monitor the temperatures. It hasn't been happening before and his PC was working just fine. What could cause the CPU to behave this way all of a sudden?

[CommanderAlex]

What CPU cooler did the system come with?? 

[KhakiHat]

You go into your bios and see if there are any turbo-esk modes on. Try turning them off and rebooting to see if that helps at all(This includes your XMP RAM profiles if present).

 

Sometimes PC's are just hella unstable.

[FastByte17]

23 minutes ago, IAmNotASmartMan said:

I'm not even sure the issue is CPU related, even indirectly, through cooling. Just seems a worthwhile test to check.

Cooling effieciency is going to slowly come down as systems get dirtier, if his new system was at the border of thermal throttling, then he didn't clean the fliters/fans, over time the effieciency of the cooling will drop and be unable to keep up. The game could have also updated to be more demanding.

Edit: The cooling could also suddenly struggle if ambient temperatures are higher than normal/before. My last GPU did this in English summers, so would step down my graphics settings for that 4/6 days every year.

Could it be a PSU issue? He tells me that the system came with 500W PSU.

[FastByte17]

11 minutes ago, CommanderAlex said:

What CPU cooler did the system come with?? 

It's pre-built system so we aren't sure.

[FastByte17]

11 minutes ago, KhakiHat said:

You go into your bios and see if there are any turbo-esk modes on. Try turning them off and rebooting to see if that helps at all(This includes your XMP RAM profiles if present).

 

Sometimes PC's are just hella unstable.

Okay, will check that too.

[CommanderAlex]

Just now, FastByte17 said:

It's pre-built system so we aren't sure.

Take a picture of it and post it here so we get an idea of what type of cooler they used. 

[LTT_fanboy]

1 hour ago, FastByte17 said:

Hello everyone,

 

I am troubleshooting a problem for my friend. He's recently been experiencing stutters (FPS Drops) when he's playing Fortnite or any other game. His specs are more than enough for what he's playing so hardware doesn't seem to be the issue. I ran anti-virus and found 3 malwares which were then quarantined by the anti-virus. All the junk files (temporary files/software cache) was removed using Ccleaner. All the drivers are up-to-date. All the unnecessary start-up programs are disabled. I am not sure anymore what's causing this issue.

 

Here are his specs:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900

RAM: 32 GB HyperX DDR4-3200 XMP RGB SDRAM (2 x 16GB)

Storage: 1 TB WD Black PCIe NVMe TLC M.2 -SSD

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070

Monitor: Samsung Odyssey G7 32” 240Hz

 

Any help is appreciated

 

Thank You!

what psu do you have?

EDIT : what wattage

[FastByte17]

4 hours ago, CommanderAlex said:

Take a picture of it and post it here so we get an idea of what type of cooler they used. 

[FastByte17]

4 hours ago, LTT_fanboy said:

what psu do you have?

EDIT : what wattage

500W

[CommanderAlex]

Just now, FastByte17 said:

~Snipped Photo~

That cooler is very inadequate to cool a 3900X. It's not even the Ryzen Wraith cooler, so if you are thermal throttling, that is not going to handle 12C/24T. 

[FastByte17]

5 hours ago, IAmNotASmartMan said:

I'm not even sure the issue is CPU related, even indirectly, through cooling. Just seems a worthwhile test to check.

Cooling effieciency is going to slowly come down as systems get dirtier, if his new system was at the border of thermal throttling, then he didn't clean the fliters/fans, over time the effieciency of the cooling will drop and be unable to keep up. The game could have also updated to be more demanding.

Edit: The cooling could also suddenly struggle if ambient temperatures are higher than normal/before. My last GPU did this in English summers, so would step down my graphics settings for that 4/6 days every year.

After launching Speccy the idle temperature was around 80 degrees:

[FastByte17]

5 minutes ago, CommanderAlex said:

That cooler is very inadequate to cool a 3900X. It's not even the Ryzen Wraith cooler, so if you are thermal throttling, that is not going to handle 12C/24T. 

So do I tell him to take it back to the store so they fix it as it's still under warranty? Or should we get the cooler replaced? The PC is idling at 80 degrees.

[CommanderAlex]

1 minute ago, FastByte17 said:

So do I tell him to take it back to the store so they fix it as it's still under warranty? Or should we get the cooler replaced? The PC is idling at 80 degrees.

I'd take it back to the store and get my money back personally. 

[CommanderAlex]

2 minutes ago, IAmNotASmartMan said:

So, prebuilds, especially from non specialist stores, are pretty reputable as being a bad way to buy a PC. If they will take it back, I would take that money and spend it with a specialist PC builder, presuming he's not tech savvy enough to build himself from parts. He can post here to get advice for his budget.

If he wants to just upgrade the cooling himself, again it's best to ask the big brains in the Cooling forum here, they'll hook him up with lots of options and knowledge.

In the short term, he can drop CPU related game settings to possibly improve the experience and temps enough. I would even take the case side off and blow a table fan in to improve circulation, like I did for a few days when my GPU fans died/started to die.

One part of the problem is that motherboard does not have any heatsinks over the VRM and will eventually cook the motherboard supplying power to this multi-core processor.