Question Intermittent 1-2 Second Lag During Various Tasks

[Lumberjack88]

I noticed this very strange behavior on my PC. Everytime I do something, no matter if it's decreasing the youtube video volume, writing a mail in gmail or outlook, scrolling through webpages, writing in an online forum etc. I get this intermittent 1-2 second lags, sometimes even 3-4 seconds. For example, I scroll down a webpage with the mouse scrolling wheel and then the lag happens before the webpage actually moves. Not always, but it's annoying as it's mostly random.

Is this a CPU related issue or is it more about the RAM or the SSD? The temperature here is heating up so maybe the heat regulation of the CPU is kicking in at weird points. I use an AIO cooler with 360 length / 3 x120 fans , so heat shouldn't be an issue theoretically.

The only overclocking I did was using the profile 1 for my DRAM to bring it up to the promised factory speed of 3600 MHz, apart from that, everything else is stock. The CPU is running in default state. I'm getting about 70° Celsius on my CPU (Tctl/Tdie) with room temperatures of about 22°. Firefox is open with 3 windows and various tabs and Excel.

I'm using the latest Windows 11 version on a PC with a 5950x CPU, a Gigabyte B550 Vision D motherboard with the latest F16a BIOS firmware, 4090 GPU, 4x16GB 3600MHz G.Skill DDR4 RAM and a WD Black 2TB SN850x SSD.

I cloned my old system SSD with the Acronis disc cloner tool and I reinstalled Windows 11 after the cloning was done. My search function is also flimsy. Sometimes I can't even type two letters without it crashing immediately.

 

[Lutfij]

Make and model of your motherboard? BIOS version for your motherboard? Might want to also see if your SSD is pending any firmware updates. How long has this issue been with you/your platform?

 

[DaleH]

I noticed this very strange behavior on my PC. Everytime I do something, no matter if it's decreasing the youtube video volume, writing a mail in gmail or outlook, scrolling through webpages, writing in an online forum etc. I get this intermittent 1-2 second lags, sometimes even 3-4 seconds. For example, I scroll down a webpage with the mouse scrolling wheel and then the lag happens before the webpage actually moves. Not always, but it's annoying as it's mostly random.

Is this a CPU related issue or is it more about the RAM or the SSD? The temperature here is heating up so maybe the heat regulation of the CPU is kicking in at weird points. I use an AIO cooler with 360 length / 3 x120 fans , so heat shouldn't be an issue theoretically.

The only overclocking I did was using the profile 1 for my DRAM to bring it up to the promised factory speed of 3600 MHz, apart from that, everything else is stock. The CPU is running in default state. I'm getting about 70° Celsius on my CPU (Tctl/Tdie) with room temperatures of about 22°. Firefox is open with 3 windows and various tabs and Excel.

I'm using the latest Windows 11 version on a PC with a 5950x CPU, 4090 GPU, 4x16GB 3600MHz G.Skill DDR4 RAM and a WD Black 2TB SN850x SSD.

I'd look at performance monitor and see what parameter is changing when the problem occurs.

 

[Lumberjack88]

Make and model of your motherboard? BIOS version for your motherboard? Might want to also see if your SSD is pending any firmware updates. How long has this issue been with you/your platform?

It's a Gigabyte B550 Vision D motherboard with the very latest F16a BIOS Firmware. I'm only using XMP1 Profile for the RAM overclocking, otherwise it's left at optimized defaults.

I'd look at performance monitor and see what parameter is changing when the problem occurs.

It's tough to pin it down exactly. It's just about 1 to 2 seconds lags, but I do seem to sometimes notice a CPU spike that occurs after the lags, though the spikes are miniscule. Though I'm not sure that this is conclusive evidence that it's a CPU problem, as the miniscule shifts in workload might've been caused by something else.

Not sure if it's relevant, but I basically cloned my old ADATA system drive, which had 2TB to the new WD Black SN850x with also 2TB. I've used the Acronic Disc cloner tool and afterwards, I reinstalled Windows 11 once again while keeping all the rest of the data as it was.

I do notice that my search function is also only working sporadically. Sometimes I type in a word and the search window just disappears, sometimes I can't even finish a word. It crashes as soon as I type in a letter.

Should I try reindexing the whole system drive and see if that helps?

I also played around with power settings and dropping it from high performance to balanced mode seems to have somewhat alleviated the issue though not completely. I had high performance mode enabled because my audio interface manufacturer, Universal Audio, recommends running the CPU at a constant frequency and in high performance mode. I'll have to check tomorrow if there are any audio dropouts within my digital audio workstation in balanced mode. There were none in high performance mode.

 

[Lumberjack88]

I payed closer attention to these lags and there is definitely something up with the CPU frequency before/during these drops:

Is my CPU faulty?

 

[DaleH]

I payed closer attention to these lags and there is definitely something up with the CPU frequency before/during these drops:

Is my CPU faulty?

I'm sure someone will have better ideas. Sometimes the only way to be sure a component is bad is to replace it with a known good component. But unless you have one, one is sometimes better off to take it to a shop where they can easily do this. But, of course, you would have to be able to reproduce it at the shop before they would be able to troubleshoot.