Narrowing down bottleneck possibilities

[Rainbrew]

I've upgraded my system in the GPU department a while back now and I had frequent stutters in multiple games. I assumed that after 3 years of not doing anything with my hard drive (had to copy files from old hard drive to new one due to possible failure I used clonezilla for the file transfer). After a clean system reinstall and establishing a shortstroked partition I assumed that the frequent stutters I had in GTA V and NFS 2015 would go away, however the FPS still drops to zero for seconds at a time in one, and causes map loading problems in the other. I reinstalled drivers with DDU so I assume that the bottleneck exists in RAM or my hard drive. I'm running a Western Digital Blue 7200rpm 1tb hard drive and 8gb of 1333mhz weird brand ram. The usage of both seems to be at least 90% at max, but I'm unsure how to monitor this without alt+tabbing from the game. Sorry for the long post I don't want there to be anything unclear as I don't have much of a budget for upgrades I'd either but an SSD for the OS or more/faster RAM. Rest of components are:

I7-2600

Gtx 1060 6gb Gaming Z

Some Gigabyte motherboard

Any help is appreciated, thank you in advance!