Bad Motherboard or Video Card

[Silencer230]

I recently started noticing a weird problem with my PC. When I have windows Areo enabled and have a couple of windows open the machine starts to lag. For example, if I minimize a window the animation is not smooth like it was before, the window animation is choppy. It's weird because I never had this problem before. Now here's the thing if I disable Areo, then everything is fine. Also, I have a dual monitor setup and I noticed taking my PC out of extended monitor mode helps with the lag as well. I have a GeForce GTX 750 Ti video card and an ASRock Z87 Extreme3 LGA 1150 motherboard.

These are the steps that I took last night to try to resolve the issue.

1. I have two 4GB RAM sticks. I booted the machine two times with each RAM stick by itself to see if any of the RAM sticks were the issue and the problem repeated itself with both RAM sticks so I crossed that out.

2. I re-seated the video card and that didn't fix the problem.

3. I removed my hard drive and installed Windows 7 on a spare SSD that I had laying around my house. Once I installed the driver for my video card and re-enabled Areo the problem returned.

I'm not home right now, but when I get home I'm going to try these things.

1. I ran across a post that someone made on a forum about a similar problem to mine. The poster said that he ended up finding out that he had a bad PCIe 3.0 slot on his ASRock motherboard. I have two PCIe 3.0 slots on my board so when I get home I'm going to plug my video card into the other PCIe 3.0 slot.

2. I'm going to buy a can of compressed air and clear out some of the dust that accumulated inside my PC.

I would really appreciate any other suggestions.

Thanks

 

[Tradesman1]

Do you have a different PSU you could try?

 

[Silencer230]

Do you have a different PSU you could try?

No but is there anyway to test for a bad power supply?

I went home yesterday and I tried changing the PICe Port and clearing out the dust from my computer and the problem still exist. Yesterday I was able to pinpoint what I'm doing within Windows thats causing the lag. To start Windows Areo has to be on for this problem to occur. I have a dual monitor setup. If I start playing a video on youtube or a video on my computer on my main screen where my start menu is, then I have no problems with lag on both screens. If I move the video on to the second screen all of the windows on my first screen lag. If I move a Window to the second screen where the video is playing, then that Window doesn't lag anymore. The video card is giving the the second screen more juice when videos are being played on it. Another thing that I noticed is that if I'm playing a video on my second screen and I start doing things on my first screen after a while the video on the second screen starts to lag, but then it fixes itself again if I put the mouse back on the second screen where the video is playing.

 

[Silencer230]

Do you have a different PSU you could try?

I think that you're right about the power supply. I noticed that when I set one of my monitors refresh rates to 59 hertz the problem would go away for 15 to 25 seconds and then return, and when it returned it lagged for no more than 7 seconds. I downloaded programs that monitored my CPU and GPU. Then I started moving a window around in a circle so that I could see when the machine was lagging. I noticed that when my machine started lagging the the GPU monitor reported a drop in the GPU load. Then I kept monitoring my system, and when the lag returned the CPU monitor reported a drop in wattage. For example lets stay the CPU was 6.5 Watts, it would drop to 5.5 or lower.

What do you guys think?

 

[Tradesman1]

If you can, get your hands on another PSU, if nothing else borrow one and see