Is it hard drive or ram that causes stuttering?

[berkopolatx4]

I've been playing Rise of the Tomb Raider recently, and I encountered several stutters during gameplay. Those stutters were especially noticable during cutscenes.

I have a GTX 1060 6GB as my GPU and i7-4790 @ 3.6 Ghz (Turbo to 4.0 Ghz) as my CPU. I have a 1TB Slow HDD (Don't have the specifications unfortunately, but its pretty slow.) and 8 GBs of ram.

Which of these might be causing the stuttering? I am planning on upgrading both but the one that causes the stuttering will be my priority. I don't care much about loading times for now.

 

[richiestang_78]

Monitor your thermals and memory usage during gaming to figure it out. Stuttering is usually one or the other, the HDD would only affect load times.

 

[berkopolatx4]

Monitor your thermals and memory usage during gaming to figure it out. Stuttering is usually one or the other, the HDD would only affect load times.

Thank you for your answer,

I have monitored my thermals, my GPU temps don't go over 70C. My maximum CPU temp is only 75C (the absolute maximum it went), so both are in safe limits.

Memory usage stays around %80 while gaming, game uses around 3.5GBs. However, I have also noticed that the disk usage sometimes goes up to 80 mb/s during gameplay so that confused me a bit.

 

[seagate_surfer]

berkopolatx4, download and run the manufactures HDD testing SW to rule out the drive being the guilty party.