Weird dip in GPU, plus spike in CPU

[sc0ut]

Hi everyone,

I'm having a weird, un-explainable, problem that has been driving me crazy over last few months. Ever since I built my new Ryzen gaming rig I've been having seemingly random stutters during (as far as I can tell only) gaming.

Every 20-30 minutes or so, the game will stutter / lag for about a 1-3 seconds, after which everything resumes pretty much as normal. The only thing is that if I also happen to be running Discord, sometimes (so not every time) I will need to restart Discord because I won't be able to hear anyone, and no-one can hear me.

I've been racking my brain over this and have searched what seems like the entire Internet, to no avail I honestly hope someone here has some suggestions that I could try. I have the latest Radeon drivers for both my motherboard and GPU. Windows 10 is fully up to date. My specs are as follows:

Asus Crosshair VII Hero
Ryzen 2700X
Samsung 970 EVO 500GB M.2
G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 - 16 GB: 3200 MHz / PC4-25600 - CL14
Sapphire Vega 64 Nitro+
Corsair RM750 PSU

 

[ChocoViennese]

As a first look, start up task manager and leave it on the 'Performance' tab. Make sure you have your disk drives and cpu graphs visible. Once one of the stutters happens, immediately have a look at the graphs to see if any of them were at 100% during the stutter period. If they were that can point you in the right direction. E.g. if the M.2 drive was at 100% for the duration of the stutter, I would be looking at advanced power settings. Anyway, post back here with the results of that.

 

[sc0ut]

I turned off the "HDD off after 20 min" function and so far no stutters yet. Will report back if they pop up again

Thanks so far!!!

 

[sc0ut]

So it seems the stutters are back. I have the HDD power saving setting turned off, but it just happened again. Any other ideas?

 

[eeii]

Got a couple of suggestions. 1. Make sure motherboard bios is up to date. 2 Check that you anti virus is not kicking a scan off. 3. I would suggest having only the programs you need loaded. If your not using a browser make sure it is not running minimised is not enough.

 

[sc0ut]

So I checked the disk write activity during this weird stutter and one of my two SSD's (the Windows boot SSD to be precise, the games are on the other SSD) has a 30% write spike during this exact moment. Seems like it has something to do with this SSD then, but the power off after x minutes has been disabled. These are my systems' only two drives btw...

 

[sc0ut]

Looks like removing my m2 nvme SSD has solved the issue.

 

[Aretak]

Out of interest, what M.2 slot did you have the NVMe SSD in? The C7H is somewhat confusingly laid out, in that the bottom M.2 slot that doesn't have the heatsink is the one that you actually want to be using, since the top slot steals PCIe lanes from your graphics card. Not that that should cause the issue you described, but it could be worth trying moving it if you were using the top one.

 

[sc0ut]

Out of interest, what M.2 slot did you have the NVMe SSD in? The C7H is somewhat confusingly laid out, in that the bottom M.2 slot that doesn't have the heatsink is the one that you actually want to be using, since the top slot steals PCIe lanes from your graphics card. Not that that should cause the issue you described, but it could be worth trying moving it if you were using the top one.

I was using the bottom one, but in my case that bottom slot was the one fitted with a heatsink out of the box.