General Audio/Video Stutters + Freezing

Spoon · January 21, 2018

Seemingly randomly my PC will experience audio and video stutters. This can happen when playing games, streaming videos, or doing anything really. They last between half a second, and about five seconds. My frames drop, sounds are robotic, and all of my controls are delayed. On top of this, my PC will freeze seemingly randomly. Looking back at logs on my PC, I think this issue started on December 11th, and I have counted 9 freezes in the past month. The PC freezes in place, and requires a hard restart. The freezing originally only happened whenever I would launch Rainbow Six, and I think I fixed that specific issue by uninstalling some Xbox 360 controller driver (I started looking for help in R6 / Steam forums). Unfortunately, this issue is no longer R6 exclusive, and can happen at any time, regardless of what task I'm doing.

My temperatures are fine, I'm pretty sure my drivers are all up to date, and windows is up to date. In the last six months I've reinstalled Windows, cleaned out my PC, reapplied new thermal paste and I've underclocked my graphics card, thinking that may be an issue since that's the latest major upgrade I've done to my PC.

PSU: Corsair CX 600.

GPU: PNY GTX 1070
CPU: FX-8350
Mobo: ASrock 970 Extreme 3
RAM: 16 Gigs (4x4) Gskill Ripjaws DDR3 1600
HDD: Samsung ST1000DM005
SDD: Sandisk SSD Plus 240G

OS: Windows 10 Pro Version 1709 x64

EDIT: I should also note that during the times of these stutters, both my CPU And GPU drop in terms of usage, by about 20% or so.

MasterProTech · January 21, 2018

Probably cpu or storage (hdd/ssd). Or it could be ur motherboard.

Spoon · January 22, 2018

18 hours ago, MasterProTech said:

Probably cpu or storage (hdd/ssd). Or it could be ur motherboard.

Do you have any sort of suggestions as to some diagnostics I can run to figure out which piece of hardware might be the faulty one?

Spoon · January 26, 2018

I've updated my BIOS and that hasn't fixed the issue. Still getting the random audio visual stutters. No freezing yet, but it's only been a few days.
EDIT: Has frozen again today, so no solution found.