I have stuttering when playing videos and games. Is my HDD useless?

[Jimmy__]

After a small search on the web I found out that I must have an HDD problem. Because I use that PC for a very long time and nothing similar has happened before.

I tried to run Skyrim and was getting stuttering all over the place. Mind you, not micro-stuttering. And the thing is the fps is at 60 and very steady.

I have tried everything. I have updated the drivers, I have messed around with the graphics settings and I formatted my HDD and installed everything all over again along with the game.

For a while, it seemed like this stuttering stopped happening. I could play for example Dark Souls with no problem. And tonight, I tried watching a video and the fps was falling below 24 all the time causing the video to be unwatchable.

Then, I decided to play again Dark Souls and the fps was falling from 30 to nearly 10. It seemed like having a hard time to load the map fast.

I googled and found out that it may be an HDD access problem. What does this mean? If a clean format can't fix it, what could? Am I screwed? Should I get a new HDD? I paid a lot for this one to have it replaced so soon!

It's a Western Digital 1TB Black Caviar.

Any suggestions?

 

[Supahos]

Could be temperature related as well. Download hwinfo and run it in sensor only mode and fire up a game pay close attention to core temps and GPU temps.


Also post your entire build on here so we know what acceptable temps are diff CPUs/GPUs have different temp thresholds