Question Intermittent stuttering on desktop and in games (both audio and graphical)

[shenstone5]

My friends system was having some issues so he decided to upgrade most of his components as he was in need of an upgrade anyway.

The specs of the PC are:
Motherboard: MSI x570 A Pro (New part)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (New part)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 (New part)
Video Card: Gigabyte Aorus GeForce GTX 1660 OC 6G (New part)
Power Supply: Corsair CP-9020047-UK Builder Series CX500 ATX (Old part)
Storage: Samsung 860 EVO 500 GB SATA 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) & WD 1 TB PC Hard Drive - Blue (Old parts)

The issue: Sometimes (about a 50/50 chance) when he boots into windows there is some graphical stuttering (almost as if its skipping a few frames) and there is a very noticeable audio stutter when playing music through Spotify for example. But the other 50% of the time there are no issues when booting into windows (even after gaming for several hours).

As the issue isn't consistently reproducible I'm unsure as to how I work out what is wrong.

I'm thinking it might be CPU related as both graphics and audio are being affected (he's not using NVIDIA HDMI audio).

What has already been tried:

• Reset the BIOS
• Install the latest drivers (including GPU drivers)
• Tested on different monitors

Points to note:

• When I was trying to reset the BIOS, the system was graphically glitching and freezing and was restarting the computer a few seconds after booting into the BIOS (although no such issues with Windows).
• The PSU is 5+ years old.
• I wasn't aware before buying the motherboard that it has an 8pin+4pin CPU power connector.
• His old PSU only has the 8pin connector but most forums seem to suggest the additional 4 pin is only needed if you are doing some intensive overclocking.
• Is it possible the lack of the additional 4 pin could be causing the issue?

Any ideas of what I could do to identify the issue or any suggestions for diagnostics?

 

[mdd1963]

Mainboard's BIOS updated to most recent?

Although there is mentioning of updating drivers, how about a full fresh install? (Leave spinning drive disconnected during install to 860 EVO and testing of rig; failing drives can cause all sorts of strange issues when connected)

Install AMD driver package

Install Geforce Experience and drivers

Install all updates

Install /run Ryzen Master and CPU-Z/bench/stress CPU, make a note of what clock speeds/temps are achieved; ideally, you'd like to see at least 4.0-4.1 GHz across all cores....
https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/ryzen-master

 

[shenstone5]

Mainboard's BIOS updated to most recent?

Although there is mentioning of updating drivers, how about a full fresh install? (Leave spinning drive disconnected during install to 860 EVO and testing of rig; failing drives can cause all sorts of strange issues when connected)

Install AMD driver package

Install Geforce Experience and drivers

Install all updates

Install /run Ryzen Master and CPU-Z/bench/stress CPU, make a note of what clock speeds/temps are achieved; ideally, you'd like to see at least 4.0-4.1 GHz across all cores....
https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/ryzen-master

I've performed a full windows reinstall, reinstalled all of the drivers, installed all windows updates. This seems to have cleared the issue up on initial boot but he still gets lag issues in games (usually last about 5 minutes and occur randomly after playing for a while).

I'm slightly anxious to update the bios because at one point we were having some issues where the system would just randomly turn off whilst messing with the bios (although those problems seem to have disappeared now). Is this likely to make much of a difference? The change log for the BIOS updates doesn't seem to talk about any of the problems that we are experiencing.

In terms of CPU when Ryzen Master is reading a peak speed of about 3.8Ghz he is experiencing the issues. At lower clock speeds (2.8Ghz was an example he gave where it was working fine) he doesn't get any stuttering.

I've asked him to report on the temperatures too but does this give any indication of what the problem might be?