Stuttering/Hitching on New PC

[RosieDreams]

I've just built my first PC about a month ago. The building process went perfectly to my delight (thank you Linus PC Building POV) however I've had some performance issues since. The only things brought from my previous build are my EVGA 750 GQ 80+ Gold and my 3060 ti. Everything else is completely brand new. Things were working great, except I would get some small stutter in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 + 2 where it'd stutter for a second and drop 1 fps to 59. I wanted to fix that and tried a youtube videos suggestion of increasing page file system to be the same amount as my RAM and using msconfig to set my CPU Cores. Doing this made everything worse. Tony Hawk was constantly stuttering to unplayable amounts. So I set those settings back to defaults, everything was still messed up. Tried system restore, it was successful (initially) but Chrome wouldn't open, so I restarted the PC and immediately started boot looping to BSOD Critical Process Died. Couldn't repair or load into safe mode. So I reinstalled windows. I was back up and running, but now all of my games and benchmarks intermittently stutter, BAD. Yesterday everything worked perfectly (HZD Benchmark and playtest, perfect. Shadow of Tomb Raider Benchmark, perfect. Tony Hawk, a few small stutters, but smooth 60 fps otherwise.) Today, every single thing stutters. Even Superposition has hitching. I've tried everything I can think of. My CPU temps never rise above 40 C gaming, my GPU usually sits around 64-74 max usage. Vids of hitching linked below. Please, any help is appreciate. (Crash Bandicoot is the smoothest, but you can see the FPS still waivers randomly.) I'm also on the latest Nvidia drivers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

System

• CPU
  i5 12600K
• Motherboard
  Asus Prime Z690-A
• RAM
  32GB DDR5 4800 Mhz
• GPU
  Zotac 3060 ti LHR Twin Edge 8GB
• Case
  NZXT H5 Flow RGB
• Storage
  Western Digital WDS500G2B0A 500GB SATA SSD, 4tb WD Blue HDD
• PSU
  EVGA 750 GQ 80+ Gold
• Display(s)
  22" 75Hz Sceptre, 20" 75Hz Sceptre
• Cooling
  NZXT T120 CPU cooler, 2x 140mm NZXT RGB Front Case Fans, 120mm NZXT GPU Case Fan, 120mm NZXT Exhaust Fan
• Keyboard
  Coolermaster SK650
• Mouse
  Razer DeathAdder Essential
• Sound
  Cyber Acoustics 2.1
• Operating System
  Windows 10 Pro

[TheBeastBHR]

I would try running in safe mode to limit services and programs in background just to make sure it is not a hardware problem. Also check before going into safe mode if stutter even happens in desktop, try moving your mouse in a linear direction and follow it with your eyes to confirm, if it stutters even in desktop then try safe mode which will help checking if problem still exists (no need to launch a game to test if it stutters on desktop). 

Side note: I've had this issue and Equalizer APO was the culprit if you have it installed try uninstalling it and restart to check if issue persists.

[RosieDreams]

4 minutes ago, TheBeastBHR said:

I would try running in safe mode to limit services and programs in background just to make sure it is not a hardware problem. Also check before going into safe mode if stutter even happens in desktop, try moving your mouse in a linear direction and follow it with your eyes to confirm, if it stutters even in desktop then try safe mode which will help checking if problem still exists (no need to launch a game to test if it stutters on desktop). 

Side note: I've had this issue and Equalizer APO was the culprit if you have it installed try uninstalling it and restart to check if issue persists.

Luckily everything runs perfectly in regular tasks on the desktop (I gave your suggestion of watching the cursor to be sure.) Oddly I had that APO on my old PC and it caused blown out audio on occasion. Never installed it on this PC. Let me give safe mode a try and I'll come back here with results.

[191x7]

15 minutes ago, RosieDreams said:

Luckily everything runs perfectly in regular tasks on the desktop (I gave your suggestion of watching the cursor to be sure.) Oddly I had that APO on my old PC and it caused blown out audio on occasion. Never installed it on this PC. Let me give safe mode a try and I'll come back here with results.

Latest Bios?

The monitors plugged into the GPU and not the integrated graphics?

[RosieDreams]

2 minutes ago, 191x7 said:

Latest Bios?

The monitors plugged into the GPU and not the integrated graphics?

My Bios is a version behind as I'm a little nervous to update it (in case of bricking) but it was running fairly well and started getting bad recently so I wouldn't have thought the Bios could cause degrading performance, could it? The monitors are all plugged into the GPU though. 

[191x7]

4 minutes ago, RosieDreams said:

My Bios is a version behind as I'm a little nervous to update it (in case of bricking) but it was running fairly well and started getting bad recently so I wouldn't have thought the Bios could cause degrading performance, could it? The monitors are all plugged into the GPU though. 

It's a pretty large upgrade from a Bios 2xx to 3xx and it includes a new Intel ME version too. I would update.

What would brick? Bios updates usually fix stuff, improve performance and/or improve compatibility, the manufacturers wouldn't release them to brick systems.

 

How are your temperatures behaving?

[RosieDreams]

19 minutes ago, 191x7 said:

It's a pretty large upgrade from a Bios 2xx to 3xx and it includes a new Intel ME version too. I would update.

What would brick? Bios updates usually fix stuff, improve performance and/or improve compatibility, the manufacturers wouldn't release them to brick systems.

 

How are your temperatures behaving?

Not specifically the Bios bricking my board. Just the possibility of a power outage in the middle of an update. As far as temps though, they're all great. My CPU idles at 28-30 c and has never gone above 62 c under heavy load, GPU idles at 30 c and never goes above 74 on full utilization. Motherboard VRM stays around 45c in intense games. Motherboard I believe stays around 26-30 c. Temps all stay below any thermal throttle limits. 

[SImoHayha]

1 hour ago, RosieDreams said:

I've just built my first PC about a month ago. The building process went perfectly to my delight (thank you Linus PC B

• Windows 10 Pro

 

you could try to disable HPET. Via CMD prompt. Google it and disable it, then reset your computer. Sometimes HPET can cause random hitches/stutters. See if that fixes it, it's quite fast to do and check.

[problemsolver]

3 hours ago, RosieDreams said:

I've just built my first PC about a month ago. The building process went perfectly to my delight (thank you Linus PC Building POV) however I've had some performance issues since. The only things brought from my previous build are my EVGA 750 GQ 80+ Gold and my 3060 ti. Everything else is completely brand new. Things were working great, except I would get some small stutter in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 + 2 where it'd stutter for a second and drop 1 fps to 59. I wanted to fix that and tried a youtube videos suggestion of increasing page file system to be the same amount as my RAM and using msconfig to set my CPU Cores. Doing this made everything worse. Tony Hawk was constantly stuttering to unplayable amounts. So I set those settings back to defaults, everything was still messed up. Tried system restore, it was successful (initially) but Chrome wouldn't open, so I restarted the PC and immediately started boot looping to BSOD Critical Process Died. Couldn't repair or load into safe mode. So I reinstalled windows. I was back up and running, but now all of my games and benchmarks intermittently stutter, BAD. Yesterday everything worked perfectly (HZD Benchmark and playtest, perfect. Shadow of Tomb Raider Benchmark, perfect. Tony Hawk, a few small stutters, but smooth 60 fps otherwise.) Today, every single thing stutters. Even Superposition has hitching. I've tried everything I can think of. My CPU temps never rise above 40 C gaming, my GPU usually sits around 64-74 max usage. Vids of hitching linked below. Please, any help is appreciate. (Crash Bandicoot is the smoothest, but you can see the FPS still waivers randomly.) I'm also on the latest Nvidia drivers.

1. What is the make and model of your SSD?
2. Are the games installed on the SSD or HDD?
3. Try removing the HDD from the PC (assuming Windows is installed to the SSD) and test a game only on the SSD
   Depending on how you installed Windows with two drives, it's possible that Windows won't boot.
4. Unplug all USB devices except mouse and keyboard and see if that changes anything
5. Try using someone else's mouse and keyboard temporarily to eliminate your mouse and keyboard as the issue
6. Following this guide to update your PC properly (and yes, that includes the UEFI)

If you haven't guessed by now... I'm guessing based on the symptoms one of your drives is bad.

If you have any .dmp files located in 

C:\Windows\Minidump\Minidump

please edit your original post and add them so we can look at the details as to why it's crashing.

[RosieDreams]

2 hours ago, RosieDreams said:

Not specifically the Bios bricking my board. Just the possibility of a power outage in the middle of an update. As far as temps though, they're all great. My CPU idles at 28-30 c and has never gone above 62 c under heavy load, GPU idles at 30 c and never goes above 74 on full utilization. Motherboard VRM stays around 45c in intense games. Motherboard I believe stays around 26-30 c. Temps all stay below any thermal throttle limits. 

So I've now run a memtest from the Bios and it all passed, so luckily no RAM issues. I've also updated the Bios to the latest version and so far it's working normally. Hopefully it stays that way. If it works I'll mark this as the answer, if not I guess I'll be updating here again.

[RosieDreams]

On 2/17/2024 at 11:19 PM, problemsolver said:

1. What is the make and model of your SSD?
2. Are the games installed on the SSD or HDD?
3. Try removing the HDD from the PC (assuming Windows is installed to the SSD) and test a game only on the SSD
   Depending on how you installed Windows with two drives, it's possible that Windows won't boot.
4. Unplug all USB devices except mouse and keyboard and see if that changes anything
5. Try using someone else's mouse and keyboard temporarily to eliminate your mouse and keyboard as the issue
6. Following this guide to update your PC properly (and yes, that includes the UEFI)

If you haven't guessed by now... I'm guessing based on the symptoms one of your drives is bad.

If you have any .dmp files located in 

C:\Windows\Minidump\Minidump

please edit your original post and add them so we can look at the details as to why it's crashing.

I install everything to my WD Blue 500 SSD with an HDD just for static storage. But following a Memtest that showed no issues and my Bios update that 191x7 suggested, all of the massive hitching has stopped. The remaining issue is something I've been experiencing since getting this 3060 ti. I have infrequent, varying crashes. I had these issues on my old PC as well as my current, new build. Could this be driver related or maybe PSU or GPU failure? I've received a nerw BSOD, DPC_Watchdog_Violation just two days ago where in the middle of just using basic Windows apps (I was only using Chrome and Remote Desktop, no games running.) and I the other times have mostly been nvlddmkm.sys BSODs. I've tried various different nvidia drivers after DDU, entire OS reinstalls with just vanilla Windows 10 (not added customizations) but the crashes are so sporadic I've found no way to  pin them down. The only things from the old PC that are in the new one is the GPU, PSU and SSDs. With the other issues that have happened I guess it could also be a faulty SSD? I unfortunately don't have another 3060 ti equivalent to test for PSU issues. The next GPU down I have is a 1070 ti, which if it's a GPU issue, that would work, but it seems like it could be a PSU issue as well since the crashing has happened with and without GPU load, even with the GPU undervolted as well.

[problemsolver]

3 hours ago, RosieDreams said:

I install everything to my WD Blue 500 SSD with an HDD just for static storage. But following a Memtest that showed no issues and my Bios update that 191x7 suggested, all of the massive hitching has stopped. The remaining issue is something I've been experiencing since getting this 3060 ti. I have infrequent, varying crashes. I had these issues on my old PC as well as my current, new build. Could this be driver related or maybe PSU or GPU failure? I've received a nerw BSOD, DPC_Watchdog_Violation just two days ago where in the middle of just using basic Windows apps (I was only using Chrome and Remote Desktop, no games running.) and I the other times have mostly been nvlddmkm.sys BSODs. I've tried various different nvidia drivers after DDU, entire OS reinstalls with just vanilla Windows 10 (not added customizations) but the crashes are so sporadic I've found no way to  pin them down. The only things from the old PC that are in the new one is the GPU, PSU and SSDs. With the other issues that have happened I guess it could also be a faulty SSD? I unfortunately don't have another 3060 ti equivalent to test for PSU issues. The next GPU down I have is a 1070 ti, which if it's a GPU issue, that would work, but it seems like it could be a PSU issue as well since the crashing has happened with and without GPU load, even with the GPU undervolted as well.

Per my last post:

On 2/17/2024 at 10:19 PM, problemsolver said:

If you have any .dmp files located in 

C:\Windows\Minidump\Minidump

please edit your original post and add them so we can look at the details as to why it's crashing.

 

[RosieDreams]

21 hours ago, problemsolver said:

Per my last post:

 

The last crash with the watchdog Bsod unfortunately failed to create a mini dump per Windows Event Log. It just created a memory dump. That file is about 2 gigs, but I could upload it somewhere and share a link if that would help?

[Bjoolz]

1 hour ago, RosieDreams said:

The last crash with the watchdog Bsod unfortunately failed to create a mini dump per Windows Event Log. It just created a memory dump. That file is about 2 gigs, but I could upload it somewhere and share a link if that would help?

If you have any dump files in C:\Windows\Minidump, upload them. Windows doesn't like you messing with files here so copy the folder itself, zip the folder and upload the zip. For the kernel dump (Memory.dmp), do the same. Zipping will reduce the size by up to 60-90%. Use a file host for this one. 

 

If they have all been DPC_Watchdog_Violations we want more than one as it can be really hard for the OS to know which driver is actually at fault with this crash. Kernel dumps are sometimes needed as Windows with minidumps will sometimes remove all the data from the other DPC queues than the one where it thinks the issue happened. 

[unclewebb]

@RosieDreams

Windows 10 is not designed to work with Intel's 12th Gen and newer CPUs that have P & E cores. It has no idea what tasks should be assigned to which cores. Some tasks will randomly get scheduled on a slower E core when it should always be scheduled on a fast P core.

 

A clean install of Windows 11 would be the best place to start troubleshooting. 

[RosieDreams]

On 2/24/2024 at 8:34 PM, unclewebb said:

@RosieDreams

Windows 10 is not designed to work with Intel's 12th Gen and newer CPUs that have P & E cores. It has no idea what tasks should be assigned to which cores. Some tasks will randomly get scheduled on a slower E core when it should always be scheduled on a fast P core.

 

A clean install of Windows 11 would be the best place to start troubleshooting. 

I had heard from the Gamers Nexus video on the topic actually using my CPU model that there is virtually no difference in performance and that the tests actually favored Windows 10 by a small margin. That video is 2 years old now however, so has there been a noticeable change since with Windows 11 updates?

[unclewebb]

@RosieDreams

Windows 10 cannot differentiate between P & E cores. You are relying on random chance for tasks to get scheduled on a P core.

 

Try disabling the E cores in the BIOS. That will guarantee that tasks are always running on the P cores.

[problemsolver]

3 hours ago, RosieDreams said:

I had heard from the Gamers Nexus video on the topic actually using my CPU model that there is virtually no difference in performance and that the tests actually favored Windows 10 by a small margin. That video is 2 years old now however, so has there been a noticeable change since with Windows 11 updates?

Straight from Intel: Performance Hybrid Core Architecture of Intel® Core™...

[RosieDreams]

On 2/26/2024 at 4:14 PM, problemsolver said:

Straight from Intel: Performance Hybrid Core Architecture of Intel® Core™...

I did try disabling Ecores and that does fix the issue, however that seems counterintuitive as I'd also be sacrificing a lot of performance in other tasks doing this. I've noticed that when launching a game and following this guide, all the issues are fixed for that run of the game.

Is this definitely a Windows 10 issue or is my CPU faulty? I opened a new post/inquiry detailing all of the steps I've tried, it seems I spoke to soon when I said the BIOS update worked.

[problemsolver]

3 hours ago, RosieDreams said:

I did try disabling Ecores and that does fix the issue, however that seems counterintuitive as I'd also be sacrificing a lot of performance in other tasks doing this. I've noticed that when launching a game and following this guide, all the issues are fixed for that run of the game.

Is this definitely a Windows 10 issue or is my CPU faulty? I opened a new post/inquiry detailing all of the steps I've tried, it seems I spoke to soon when I said the BIOS update worked.

Did you make sure you downloaded all of the latest drivers from Asus for your motherboard?

PRIME Z690-A｜Motherboards｜ASUS Global

You're going to need to click Show All. Specifically, you need all of the chipset-related drivers (check the versions and get the newest ones, as Asus lists multiple versions).

The Intel Management Engine (Intel ME) has a firmware and driver component. Both need to be up-to-date. In addition, especially with Windows 10, you need all the latest Chipset drivers to ensure that it can operate with Windows correctly

[RosieDreams]

1 hour ago, problemsolver said:

Did you make sure you downloaded all of the latest drivers from Asus for your motherboard?

PRIME Z690-A｜Motherboards｜ASUS Global

You're going to need to click Show All. Specifically, you need all of the chipset-related drivers (check the versions and get the newest ones, as Asus lists multiple versions).

The Intel Management Engine (Intel ME) has a firmware and driver component. Both need to be up-to-date. In addition, especially with Windows 10, you need all the latest Chipset drivers to ensure that it can operate with Windows correctly

I initially installed all my drivers through Asus Armoury Crate, but I've now went through the list on the page you sent and installed everything. It seems like this unfortunately didn't fix the issue however. 

[problemsolver]

14 minutes ago, RosieDreams said:

I initially installed all my drivers through Asus Armoury Crate, but I've now went through the list on the page you sent and installed everything. It seems like this unfortunately didn't fix the issue however. 

1. No riser cables or riser cards?
2. Does the Western Digital Dashboard report everything is good with your drives?
3. What does this say if you run it an Admin PowerShell window?

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth

 

[RosieDreams]

17 minutes ago, problemsolver said:

No riser cables or riser cards?

Does the Western Digital Dashboard report everything is good with your drives?

 

No risers at all and the WD Dashboard Tool says my OS SSD is 92% health and "Normal". That's the same SSD I install games to as well.

Apologies, didn't see the PowerShell suggestion. I've ran that just now and no corruption is detected.

[problemsolver]

On 3/9/2024 at 5:38 PM, RosieDreams said:

No risers at all and the WD Dashboard Tool says my OS SSD is 92% health and "Normal". That's the same SSD I install games to as well.

Apologies, didn't see the PowerShell suggestion. I've ran that just now and no corruption is detected.

Welp, I can only tell you what I'd do in your situation.
What I'd do is install Windows 11 on another drive and test. I'd make sure I had all of those drivers installed first and test.

If it works great, that would rule out my CPU, and leave me with Windows 10, the M.2 slot, or the SSD as the culprit I do believe.

Curious if anyone else can think of a quicker/better test?