Question Games lag, except when Im recording - need help

May 2, 2024
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Hey Everyone
Got a problem with my pc and would appreciate if someone could help. Im not a pc wizard and most of the things I tried was from doing google search, but nothing seems to help and Im losing my mind already. Essentially everything is not working as it should since day 1, and fixing one problem leads to another one. So here's the summary of what happened so far:

At first, the pc would shutdown and restart after ~10 minutes of gaming (Please note Im not playing modern games on high details, rather 10 years old games on low details which this pc should handle no problem). So I started gaming with temperature monitoring software and it turned out that the temps were high. I went to the store I bought it, and they said that the case is too small, not allowing air to flow properly and so they gave me new, bigger one. This improved situation, but didn't solved the problem; let's say now I was able to play 12 minutes instead of 10 before pc restarts. Meanwhile I also found out that max temp for my gpu is 83 and that indeed was the temperature it was restarting at. I then went to google search and that way I learned about nvidia control panel. I started tweaking with options and eureka! The option that stopped pc from restarting was setting fps limit to 60, and that also reduced temperatures/usage massively. In general, pc doesn't restart anymore and now the games ran smoothly... except random freezes here and there.

Sometimes these freezes happen rarely and don't bother me at all, and sometimes they just make the games unplayable. And by freezes I mean whenever some action happens the game stops for 1-5 seconds and resumes after that (I mean that time in game passes when it's frozen, I'm not resuming from moment it stopped, it's already after that lag). Similar thing happens with discord- Whenever that lag happens people suddenly stop talking and after few seconds they all start rapping, like sound tries to catch up after lag. So today I decided I will post here as this forum helped me in the past with other problems, but before that happened I decided I will record some footage to show how this lag looks like. And now comes the biggest mystery. Whenever I record the lag doesn't occur. For real, I start recording - lag is gone, I stop recording - it starts lagging again. I tried doing some google search, but usually people have opposite problem - it lags when They record, not when they stop recording.

I don't know that to do with this next. If someone has some idea please share it with me. Obs is the software I tried recording with and settings for recording there are rather set for good quality, and game I tried that with is league of legends with medium details. Oh, and one more thing I tried to do was updating drivers and all that went smoothly, except for one thing that caught my attention. When I checked the driver for monitor it said it is from 2006, so I went to manufacturer website and downloaded new one from there, but it doesn't allow me to install it, instead it says I already have the newest one (but it can't be newest if it's from 2006, right?).

Also here are my specs:
Processor: AMD ryzen 5 5600
Video card: Nvidia geforce rtx 3600 Ti
Ram: 32gb
Windows:11
Monitor: Acer k222hql
 
When you are doing to little stuff, 10 year old games at 60FPS, the CPU will clock down and use very few cores at very low clocks, that can cause situations were it can take a while for the whole CPU to turn on and clock up whenever there is a sudden increase in compute.
If you are streaming/recording the whole CPU has a decent amount of work to do so all cores run at full, or at least high, speed so you don't get any lag.
You can try going into bios and disabling all the turbo/ cool'n'quiet settings so it will always run at high speeds, you will lose some power efficiency though, increasing your power bill.

Also your components hitting thermal limits unless you restrict them to 60FPS shows that the PC is set up very badly, you should find somebody with some knowledge to set it up better in general.