CPU Causing Small Lag Spikes/Stutters?

Looking at that report, it looks as if one of your usb controllers and a storage controller are causing some latency issues - They will all be fighting for cpu interrupts on shared IRQs, and/or pci lanes.

Before we begin, I suggest insist we observe and abide by the first five rules of all things I.T:

#1. backup
#2. backup
#3. backup
#4. backup
And yup, you guessed it:
#5. backup

Seriously, take a macrium reflect (find it here) image and save your current BIOS settings to a profile or something, I'm sure the board will have that capability. If it all goes **** up, (it probably won't but you never know!), you'll be glad you had your bum covered.


So here we go:

Make sure that your sata drives are plugged into the intel ports on your board, using to the two white, edge-facing connectors. Leave your optical drive unplugged for now.

Get into your BIOS and change the following:

under ata port information, disable any ports that arent in use, and disable hot plug on all ports.

under peripherals, check sata controllers, I'm curious as to whether that's the intel sata controller that's a part of the z77 chipset, or an additional sata controller (ie an asmedia controller or something.) Disable it and reboot, if you suddenly can't boot to windows, re-enable it, adn carry on. if it boots fine, then get back into the bios and continue.

Disable the internal graphics and set init display device to auto - set all the shared ram and dvmt option to thier lowest values, not auto.

Set xHCI mode to auto.

I assume you are using your on-board audio: if you are using a soundcard, audio out via your graphics card, or and usb based audio, disable this.

disable TPM if its on, which it wont be.

enable the usb2.0 controller, and make sure kb&m are using these ports.

OnBoard USB3.0 Controller#1 - disable this. this will turn off some of the usb3 ports on the back panel, so dont worry if some don;t work any more, just use a different port. I have a feeling this might be one of the culprits - a crappy 3rd party device not playing properly with the microsoft drivers.

PCI express x4 slot - set to x1

Under superIO disable serial port A

Disable intel smart connect technology.

Have a dig throught the bios and see if you can find an option along the lines of PCI latency timer, set it to 32. if you have this setting, remember where you found it.

Reboot. I'm fairly certain your system will complain about something or other, but fire up a game and see how it handles. If it's still stuttery, try 64 or 128.

Still stuttery? reset that pci clock latency to 32 and Re-install windows with everything else you have just done still in place - its possible the drivers for anything that's been disabled or changed are still loading up and causing issues.

STILL issues? :mad: Try a new PSU - there's always the possibility that the games working your system the hardest are pushing both your cpu and gpu hard (I'm looking at you Arma...) which will require more power - a power supply's ability to deliver it's rated power does degrade over time, and if you happen to have a sub-par piece of kit, or one that's past it's prime and is delivering unreliable power at high loads, then it's time to invest in a new, quality psu. But see if you can borrow a known good one first so you're not splashing the cash for no reason.

Happy fault hunting! :cool:
 
Don't worry; it looks really daunting, but there's not a great deal to it in reality. Just don;t go messing around with voltages or clock speeds, multipliers, memory timings and the like, and you'll be fine. Also practice rules 1 through 5, and consider it an opportunity to learn something more about your system, and PCs in general. :)
 
Right so before I tried this I thought to myself what if it only happens on multiplayer and it's some connection issue? (I have fibre optic internet but it could be some underlying factor).

I installed Just Cause 2 and played it for half an hour, single player and not one stutter, maybe this is something of some note? Will test more later.
 
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