Question Do components degrade much with age?

[LepreSean97]

Bit of a PC noob so I apologize in advance. I have had a Ryzen 5 1600 CPU and an ASUS Prime B350 Plus Motherboard ,which I bought together, for 7-8 years and have used my PC for gaming almost daily.

Over the past couple months it hasn't run so well, for example, I can't use overlays (Discord, Nvidia etc) in my games without getting serious mouse lag ( Where my game would freeze when I move the mouse). I went full SSD a month ago, from having a 500GB SSD boot drive and 1 2TB HDD for larger games, to replacing the HDD with an SSD. This has helped a little bit but not much. The bios is up to date I think, I used the built in installer and it said there was none available.

There's no overheating as far as I can tell but I've never replaced my thermal paste since I've never removed the cooler. (Corsair H60). I'm wondering if I should consider replacing the CPU and possibly the Mobo. I have my eye on an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, but nervous about manually updating the Bios, since I will need to according to PCPartpicker.

GPU: RTX 2060
PSU: Corsair RM650x

 

[Eximo]

Monitor temperatures and clock speeds to see if your CPU is overheating. AIOs liquid coolers have a finite lifespan and you are well past it so I suspect the H60 more than anything.

Thermal paste as well can experience pump out or dry out effects over time.

5600X is a fine upgrade. BIOS update isn't too bad.

PRIME B350-PLUS - Support

www.asus.com

[Motherboard/Desktop] ASUS EZ Flash 3 - Introduction | Official Support | ASUS USA

www.asus.com

 

[COLGeek]

This is likely more Windows related, than hardware related. How old is your base Windows install?

Also, how full are your storage devices?

 

[Ralston18]

And this:

"I can't use overlays (Discord, Nvidia etc) in my games without getting serious mouse lag ( Where my game would freeze when I move the mouse)."

Use Task Manager, Resource Monitor, and Process Explorer (Microsoft, free) to observe system performance.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

Use all three tools, but use only one tool at a time.

Observe first without using Discord, Nvidia, etc.. Then, leaving the tool window open play a game as you normally do.

Objective being to discover what resource changes occur when the mouse lags/freezes during game play.

= = = =

You can also look in Reliability History/Monitor and Event Viewer. Either one or both may be capturing some error code, warning, or even informational event just before or at the time of the lags/freezes.

Check Reliability History/Monitor first. Much more end user friendly and the timeline format may prove revealing.

Event Viewer requires more time and effort to navigate and understand.

To help:

How To - How to use Windows 10 Event Viewer | Tom's Hardware Forum (tomshardware.com)

 

[LepreSean97]

This is likely more Windows related, than hardware related. How old is your base Windows install?

Also, how full are your storage devices?

My windows 10 install is from 10/11/2020. The large 2tb storage is less than half full but the 500GB boot drive has 80gb free out of 342gb. Been trying to figure out what's filling it as I have no games installed there and all media and documents go to the large drive. The boot drive is a Samsung 850 EVO that I got 6 years ago.

 

[LepreSean97]

And this:

"I can't use overlays (Discord, Nvidia etc) in my games without getting serious mouse lag ( Where my game would freeze when I move the mouse)."

Use Task Manager, Resource Monitor, and Process Explorer (Microsoft, free) to observe system performance.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

Use all three tools, but use only one tool at a time.

Observe first without using Discord, Nvidia, etc.. Then, leaving the tool window open play a game as you normally do.

Objective being to discover what resource changes occur when the mouse lags/freezes during game play.

= = = =

You can also look in Reliability History/Monitor and Event Viewer. Either one or both may be capturing some error code, warning, or even informational event just before or at the time of the lags/freezes.

Check Reliability History/Monitor first. Much more end user friendly and the timeline format may prove revealing.

Event Viewer requires more time and effort to navigate and understand.

To help:

How To - How to use Windows 10 Event Viewer | Tom's Hardware Forum (tomshardware.com)

Thanks for this! I'll give this a shot when I have time, as I'm going abroad for a couple of weeks.

 

[LepreSean97]

Monitor temperatures and clock speeds to see if your CPU is overheating. AIOs liquid coolers have a finite lifespan and you are well past it so I suspect the H60 more than anything.

Thermal paste as well can experience pump out or dry out effects over time.

5600X is a fine upgrade. BIOS update isn't too bad.

PRIME B350-PLUS - Support

www.asus.com

[Motherboard/Desktop] ASUS EZ Flash 3 - Introduction | Official Support | ASUS USA

www.asus.com

H60 isn't too expensive and it served me well so I guess I can replace that. I didn't even apply the paste as it was pre-applied. What about the Mobo? When buying my new SSD I was going to get a faster one but the Mobo wouldn't support the higher speeds. Is there anything else it would restrict?

 

[NedSmelly]

WinDirStat will help you visually work out what’s filling up your boot SSD. It could be a hibernation file, system restore cruft, temp file folders, or something more sinister. Also try running disk cleanup.

The other thing that could be happening is the dreaded AMD USB scheduler ‘bug’. Seems to cause problems more with USB 2.0 devices, such as your mouse. BIOS updates may or may not fix it. Buildzoid on YouTube suggested an alternate solution of changing the wait states in bios.

 

[Eximo]

H60 isn't too expensive and it served me well so I guess I can replace that. I didn't even apply the paste as it was pre-applied. What about the Mobo? When buying my new SSD I was going to get a faster one but the Mobo wouldn't support the higher speeds. Is there anything else it would restrict?

PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs are plenty fast. You can barely tell the difference between 3.0 and 4.0 NVMe drives unless you do a lot of large file transfers. Limiting factors are generally your internet speeds and network connections.

 

[LepreSean97]

WinDirStat will help you visually work out what’s filling up your boot SSD. It could be a hibernation file, system restore cruft, temp file folders, or something more sinister. Also try running disk cleanup.

The other thing that could be happening is the dreaded AMD USB scheduler ‘bug’. Seems to cause problems more with USB 2.0 devices, such as your mouse. BIOS updates may or may not fix it. Buildzoid on YouTube suggested an alternate solution of changing the wait states in bios.

You are a lifesaver! It was files from Ark:Survival and Infinite Warfare, despite uninstalling them years ago. It has freed up almost half the boot storage. I wondered why they were still showing up in Geforce Experience (And still are after deleting the files for some reason?)

 

[NedSmelly]

I wondered why they were still showing up in Geforce Experience (And still are after deleting the files for some reason?)

Check GeForce Experience in Settings -> Games for the folder location it’s searching. Then go there to see if there are any leftover files to clean up. Then re-scan games.