(GTX 1080ti / i7 7700k / 16gb DDR4) Games play fine, but desktop and Youtube? Oh boy...

Jun 11, 2018
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I have recently came across the most odd thing I've ever seen in my 20 years of building PCs. I have a non OC 1080ti with a non OC 7700k pushing 4.2ghz. As you can imagine I can play almost anything under the sun maxed out with no issues whatsoever.

HOWEVER...

Up until recently when I exit the game, the entire system slows down dramatically. Youtube videos stutter, even the cursor stutters when moving across the screen. Resource monitor doesn't show anything crazy and GPU temp shows the GPU is using like 5% memory.

I've tried everything from reinstalling the GPU driver, to rolling it back, to reinstalling windows. Nothing seems to remedy it, EXCEPT restarting my system. The games themselves show no stutter at all, only when I exit them. When I run Heaven benchmarking while the system is "bogged down", even on extreme it shows 180FPS, but it LOOKS like 15FPS. What gives?

I'm at a COMPLETE loss. Hope the fine folks here can point me in a right direction! Is this even a GPU issue?

EDIT: I completely forgot, this is also a legit copy of Windows 7.
 


Absolutely GENIUS! I had no idea. Upgraded to Windows 10 and the problem SEEMS to have been resolved. Thank you SO much Volk!!!
 
I run Windows 10 64 Pro and Windows 7 64 bit ultimate in dual boot on both skylake I7-6700k+ ASRock z170m/ac Fatality+ Power color R9 280X and kabylake i7-7700k+ Asus Strix Z270E+ EVGA 1080TI without any issues on both systems, no stuttering on either integrated graphics or discrete, and windows 7 feels much snappier feeding of Samsung 960 NVMe PCIe 3.0X4 boot SSDs than windows 10
It's worth noting that it really took me a lot of time to get windows 7 installation and drivers right.