[SOLVED] GPU usage drops to 0 and I get screen freezes in games

[jlags09]

For the last few months I have been having tons of screen freezes that last about 5 seconds, but they are very frequent. They don't happen too much when I first get on a game, but as I keep playing they get more and more frequent to the point where it's freezing every 10 seconds and the game is literally unplayable until I restart my computer. It's worse with some games, but recently I have eventually been getting screen freezes in all games. Also in some games my audio cuts in and out a lot. Another thing to note is that most of the time my ping spikes to 1000+ only during the freeze and I see it come back down to normal the second it stops freezing. I've tried countless hours trying to fix it or even find what the problem could be, but I can't figure it out. During these freezes my GPU usage drops to 0 which doesn't seem normal at all but idk what is causing that to happen. I can't tell if it is a faulty GPU because I don't know why my ping spikes during it and my audio cuts out a lot. I have built this PC only about 6 months ago and it has always had a very minor issue with screen freezes, but it has gotten way worse to the point where a lot of games are unplayable.

I can say for sure that nothing is overheating during these games, usage of everything in task manager is nowhere near 100%, and my RAM had 0 errors in memtest86 and windows memory diagnostic. I don't know what else to check at this point.

My Specs:
Ryzen 5 3600 CPU
MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GPU
ASRock B450 Steel Legend motherboard
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB RAM
EVGA 500 BR Power supply

Any insight or ideas to help fix at all is very much appreciated!

 

[Lutfij]

I've tried countless hours trying to fix it or even find what the problem could be, but I can't figure it out.
What have you tried to do to come to the conclusion that nothing's working...?


Make sure you're on the latest BIOS for your motherboard. Then check and see if you're on the latest OS version(2004), then use DDU to uninstall your GPU drivers and then reinstall them using the latest manually downloaded from Nvidia's support site.

You might also want to borrow a higher quality PSU from a friend or neighbor to see if your PSU is incapable of delivering necessary power to the entire system.