Lag spikes when loading

Mr_Lutece

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Dec 5, 2015
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Hello, people. I have an issue with my gaming PC; when I play games and they have to load something, I see a 0.5-1s drop in frames, then they are back to normal. This is random from what I've been experiencing, sometimes the drop is to 1-5 frames, other times to 1/3-1/2 of the current FPS, and sometimes not drop at all.

It is very painful to test since sometimes I have the problem every time there is a chance for it to happen, other times I can try for half an hour and see no drop at all. (I can record videos to show you what I mean).
Examples of this happening:
-In The Walking Dead when I have to answer or make a choice
-In The Banner Sage when the caravan stops and a dialogue pops out
-In Dota when a huge team fight takes place with lots of abilities used at the same time

Things I've already tried:
-Formatting
-Updating Drivers (several in fact)
-Changing energy plan
-Changing options in Nvidia control panel
-Disabling Windows GameDVR
-Changing PCI slot for the graphic card
-Monitoring the CPU when this happens, which doesn't show any weird spike.

My specs are:
i7 6700 3.40Ghz
SSD Samsung Evo 850 (windows installed here and a second HDD for most of my games)
Nvidia GTX 980ti
XFX PRO850W 850W ATX


I'm stuck with my current knowledge, so I would be grateful if someone could help me solve this.
Thank you very much.

EDIT: Here are the results of The OCCT CPU test

http://imgur.com/a/I9wdp

 
Solution
Ok, good to know that you found the solution, and thanks for sharing, useful...
Ok, you've got plenty of RAM. I've had similar issues over the years and have tried different fixes. The one fix that helped me was disabling virtual memory......not recommended if you have low RAM, but at 16GB you're fine. The only slight danger in disabling it is, if you have a crash, there will be no crash report as there is nowhere to save it to.

You can disable it in advanced system settings, probably easier to google how to do it than my trying to explain. If it doesn't improve anything, you can always enable it again.

 
Ok, you've got plenty of RAM. I've had similar issues over the years and have tried different fixes. The one fix that helped me was disabling virtual memory......not recommended if you have low RAM, but at 16GB you're fine. The only slight danger in disabling it is, if you have a crash, there will be no crash report as there is nowhere to save it to.

You can disable it in advanced system settings, probably easier to google how to do it than my trying to explain. If it doesn't improve anything, you can always enable it again.

Tried it, and after a couple of tests, it happened again.
What bothers me the most is that it's random as ****, it was perfect for the first seven tries and then, boom, 1 fps freeze.
Thanks btw, I'm leaving that disabled anyways.
 
I SOLVED IT
I tried installing the games on the SSD and I had no issues so googling a lot I found this:

the freezes are caused by the game loading some files (sounds generally)
the freeze happens because the hard disk went into "head-park" mode while being idle. this is a new bullshit feature of "new-er" hard disks called APM, which wears the drives faster and causes micro freezes in games. (but hey, its saves a little power)
it got enabled with recent intel drivers, before it was disabled.
the solution is to use a program that can disable APM

I had the games on a WD blue affected by the issue and since its a bit old now I have purchased a WD Black (1TB)
 
Ok, good to know that you found the solution, and thanks for sharing, useful to know.

What's funny about that though, most people still use a HDD for their games (they might keep a couple on SSD and the rest on HDD), yet head parking doesn't seem like a wide spread issue in the gaming community. I know that when I'm gaming from a HDD, it doesn't park until sometime after I've finished playing....always thought there was some feature built in to the OS that didn't park the HDD if you're gaming from it.
 
Solution