PC freezes and stalls but 0% CPU usage?

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21 Sep 2003
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1,406
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Leicester
Hi,

This has been bugging me for almost a year now, and started ever since I built this PC.

My PC specs are:

Intel core2 e4300 @ 3.2 ghz (356 FSB x 9 )
Asus P5N-e SLI motherboard
2x 2gig ReaperX memory sticks
Nvidia 9600GT 512 mb
Corsair HX 620W modular power supply
Primary HD: WD Raptor 74gig (runs WindowsXP and program files)
Secondary HDs are Samsung and Hitachi ones, one of which has my documents.

Its fully stable, I even used IntelBurn test and it passed that several times. CPU temperatures with realtemp are 35C idle and no more than 62C full load.
Memory is stable as well with many loops of memtest.

It been sitting at 3.2ghz ever since I built it about a year ago now.

The problem is that at certain random times, which appear to have some sort of link to when the hard drives are working, the PC acts a if the CPU is at 100% usage and freezes slightly, but the CPU is barely even 10%, sometimes it occurs with 0% usage.

Its as if there is a bandwidth limit on the motherboard itself that is holding back the whole thing. Its hard to explain as I am not an electrician so dont know if that is even possible.

An example is if Im playing an offline game whilst downloading a file, no matter what speed it is, the game framerate suffers, even though it is only using one of the CPU cores - the other core is at 0% usage.

Another would be that if I load outlook 2007 and it receives email, then I cant do anything else with the PC at all. Even if its just receiving 200kb worth of emails, my CPU usage is barely 10% in total, but my PC wont load or run anything else until its finished. If Im browsing firefox and load outlook, then everything I click e.g. a tag or link has a delay of a few seconds.

Its a really annoying problem that I cant seem to solve, anyone come across this sort of problem? Could it be caused by a corrupted windows? Is it this motherboard? Or could it be the CPU is damaged?

EDIT: Just found I posted this problem in the large thread about this motherboard with someone else having the same problem, but we couldnt find a solution: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=13192170#post13192170
 
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I think I have fixed this, cant really test properly as the problem was not reproducible at will or measurable by a benchmark etc.

My old LDT in bios was 3x for stability - I put this to 4x after reading this is the hypertransport between north and south bridge, but then I also put the northbirdge voltage to the maximum it allows me in the bios (I have active fan cooling on it so should be okay). 4x used to not even load windows, but maybe the voltage on the northbridge is helping, or the new ram I got a couple weeks ago is less sensitive, who knows.

Will be installing an e5200 I bought months ago at a cheap price and see if I get the same problems with LDT 3x with that CPU.
 
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