No smoothness, fps drops, occasional stuttering

[Choli]

I've read almost every post about fps drops, stutter etc and followed every instruction for those probs and nothing helped. The thing is, every piece of my hardware is fine, up and running. Those are the specs:

i5 3470
MSI B75A G43
Kingston HyperX 2x4GB
Gigabyte HD7970 3GB Windforce
BeQuiet L7 630W
SanDisk SSD 64GB
Asus Xonar DX/XD
HDD Samsung F3 Spinpoint
LG flatron w2261vp-pf

And now:
There is no malware, no viruses etc
No registry, disk, ram probs
Cleaned with ccleaner
All drivers and firmware (including windows) up to date
Temperatures are good, no overheati g during stress
Disk was defragmented recently (no effect)

The fps drops are almost on every game i play.

Diablo3 the fps drop on random locations with no reason, tried disabling shadows and there was no effect. Sometimes sound lagging

League of Legends, even on 60fps the game is kind of laggy.

These are just examples. Even when the frame rate is stable at 60 or above i've got this feeling of 'smoothlessness'.

I just can't find the source of this issue. IMHO my PC specs are rather decent. I played on my friends pc with also good specs like 2500k and gtx 560ti but he had a newer monitor and the effect of smoothness was like it should be. I thought it could be my HDD which is rather old and might be slow or my Monitor which also has it years but still running.

I could change those 2 old parts into newer ones buy i have to be 100% sure it is the issue.

Pls help 🙁

 

[Choli]

Bought new cable, changed to sata 3, tried all ports - same effect.

Almost no usage on idle.

 

[Alec Mowat]

What brand of HD?

 

[Choli]

Samsung F3 Spinpoint HD502HJ, thats the full name

 

[Alec Mowat]

Run a full test with Seagate Tools on that disk.
http://www.seagate.com/ca/en/support/downloads/item/seatools-win-master/

 

[Choli]

Is it compatible with samsung?

 

[Alec Mowat]

Is it compatible with samsung?

Yes, Samsung drives are rebadged Seagates. It's from the official support.

 

[Choli]

All tests passed...

 

[Alec Mowat]

In Windows

Right click on "My Computer" (or the name of the computer, usually on the desktop, or if you open any folder, should be on the left tabs)

Go to "Manage", expand "Storage"

In Win 8.1 you can right click on the Start Button and Disk Management should be an option. In 7, you should be able to type Computer Manager in the search and it will appear


Under Storage, Disk Manager - Right click on the harddrive on the left (Not the partition) and go to properties.

Under policies, confirm "Enable Write Caching... " is checked

I feel like there's an error with that disk. It seems to be one of those high performance disks that were designed for server speeds.


Also; very important
Go to
http://www.msi.com/product/mb/B75AG43.html#/?div=Driver&os=Win8.1%2064

Make sure your BIOS, and all of the Firmware drivers are up to date.
Specifically: Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver

 

[Choli]

BIOS an all drivers are up to date write caching checked as well

 

[Choli]

Look at this chart. I'm really concerned about those drops, dunno if it helps in some way.

 

[Alec Mowat]

Potentially. It might just be the delay while it loads the next file for benchmarking

At this point
run chkdsk /R /F on the disk in question from an elevated command prompt
Than try defragging the disk

 

[Choli]

I've done these 2 days ago and went fine, no errors nor bad sectors or anything. Everything is working fine IMO. I still have no idea where's the problem I'm just helpless.

 

[Alec Mowat]

I found a similar HD's results; and they appear to be the same
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/post-your-hd-tune-hd-tune-pro-scores-here-hdd-only.168442/

The HD isn't the issue here.

What drive is the page file located on? Are you seeing any Page Faults in the resource manager?

 

[Choli]

The page file is located on C: drive and i see no page faults in the manager

 

[Alec Mowat]

Not much else left to do but try a different hard drive. It could be the SATA controller on the motherboard.

Did you verify the drives are using ACPI and not IDE mode?

 

[Chucky8010]

i had a similar issue before when i had a samsung 500gb hdd and games were slow on good specs but when i changed the hdd to western digital 1tb
the games returned to normal so why don't you try another hdd

 

[Choli]

Both Drives are in AHCI Mode.

@Chucky8010
This is the last resort for me, I want to check all the possibilities before buying a new HDD. I was thinking about WD Blue WD10EZEX or a Seagate.

I've also tried forcing constant voltage in MSI Afterburner 3 beta 19, but there was no effect.

 

[Alec Mowat]

Both Drives are in AHCI Mode.

@Chucky8010
This is the last resort for me, I want to check all the possibilities before buying a new HDD. I was thinking about WD Blue WD10EZEX or a Seagate.

I've also tried forcing constant voltage in MSI Afterburner 3 beta 19, but there was no effect.

Try IDE for kicks if you haven't yet.

Nothing to do with the videocard, we already determined it was the HDD when we moved the game to the other drive.

 

[Choli]

Tried with IDE and guess what... no effect. Well i have to buy a neww HDD afterall, i will need some extra storage in the near future.

 

[Alec Mowat]

Tried with IDE and guess what... no effect. Well i have to buy a neww HDD afterall, i will need some extra storage in the near future.

I would avoid those high performance HDD's, just pick up a 7,200 Sata 6Gbps drive and it will perform well enough. Anything but a green drive...

 

[Ghostface1994]

Same thing used to happen to me on my current rig.

UPDATING WINDOWS did the trick.

I saw a Significant performance increase of about 70 %

 

[Choli]

I wrote that in the first post, my windows is up to date...

 

[Choli]

Is WD Blue WD10EZEX good enough for gaming + storage?

 

[Alec Mowat]

Yup, should be perfectly fine

 

[farmfowls]

Sorry for coming in late, but did the new HDD fix things?