Random stutters with no apparent trigger

[Lalit Kumar]

Hi. I've been having some issues for some time now. There are stutters. Not only during playing games, it happens randomly. I'm finding it hard to explain. It happens even while I'm watching YouTube on 1080p. EVERYTHING stutters for a solid second or two. The cursor stutters, the audio stutters, the video stutters everything stutters. First I thought it might be bad drivers so I tried different drivers, didn't work. I was so frustrated with this, I switched to linux and the same thing continued there too. I came back to Windows due to Adobe. It happens at random times and the PC is not even under stress. It happened while watching youtube, playing Max Payne, a game from 2001 and even Hogwarts legacy.

I can rule out the GPU because it started only after I upgraded my CPU and RAM. I was on the same GPU for before and had no such issues. The CPU or RAM might be the culprit but how do I go about testing these ? What are my options ? Does having a secondary HDD connected cause this ? It didn't before tho. Any help would be appreciated.

Specs :
Ryzen 5 5500 (Upgraded from Ryzen 3 1200)

Gigabyte B450M (OLD)

XPG 8x2GB 3200Mhz (Upgraded from 8+4GB generic)

Asus Radeon RX 6600 (OLD)

Gigabyte 240GB NVMe (OLD)

WD Green 240GB SATA SSD (OLD)

WD Blue 2TB HDD (OLD)

[XYZ8858]

Have you updated video drivers? What BIOS version?

[OddOod]

33 minutes ago, Lalit Kumar said:

upgraded my CPU and RAM

Might be a microcode problem. Aside from updating the BIOS, I'd try a fresh win install to see if it will help. I know that *nix didn't fix it but could still be worth a shot
 

[ChrisLoudon]

1 hour ago, Lalit Kumar said:

Any help would be appreciated.

Have you tried looking at a hardware monitor like HWInfo or even the Windows build in resource monitor to see what's going on at the time of the stutter?

 

What you are looking for would be a sharp spike in CPU or RAM or HDD usage to 100% during the period of stutter as those 3 things would probably cause your PC to temporarily lock or at the very least chug so badly.

 

Another issue could be a faulty NIC or Wifi adapter or bad drivers.

 

I had an old Zotac board which for some reason would cause my entire system to stutter (even mouse input) when there was any network activity through the onboard wifi adapter. Took me yonks to work out that was the culprit. Disabled the card in BIOS, went with wired and everything worked a treat.

 

[Lalit Kumar]

1 hour ago, OddOod said:

Might be a microcode problem. Aside from updating the BIOS, I'd try a fresh win install to see if it will help. I know that *nix didn't fix it but could still be worth a shot
 

It was a BIOS issue. I was on a 2021 issue. It's the fTPM stutter which I didn't encounter since I win 11 wasn't supported on my Ryzen 3 1200. Thanks a lot for pointing this out and @XYZ8858 too