PC Experiencing 'Stuttering' Issues...

[zack_gray]

OK, so VERY broad title, but I must admit I'm very much at a loss as to what's causing this.

So, to begin; about a week & a half ago, I noticed that the sound on my PC was making a slight 'popping' or 'crackling' noise, about every 10 seconds, or when a large dose of sound came about (i.e. Firing the 'Fatman' in Fallout 4). My soundcard, which is an Asus ROG Xonar Phoebus 7.1 (longest name ever) was recently patched to a higher version of the firmware (10.0.1.40 for anyone interested) so I decided to move over to newer Firmware Asus are offering, the SonicStudio 1.1.3 beta, but if anything it made it worse. So I downgraded, and upgraded following the upgrade path, but still no joy. Thinking it was the soundcard itself, I removed the headset from the card and ran it through the in-built sound card on the motherboard, but still the exact same errors. Thinking headset, I swapped my headphones for stand-alone speakers, but I can still notice it, so it's coming from the PC somewhere.

What I also began to notice at the time were some other problems that may have been there previously, but I may not have noticed them, or at least didn't notice until I started playing Mad Max (the game).

The sound stuttering was there, but also some micro-stutter on the screen. Thinking that I'd used too higher settings, I downsized the settings to low to test, and noticed that I was still getting the same issue.

I then tested in a few other games, however I can't say that their results are 100% accurate, as they're notorious for having intermittent framerates anyway (Fallout 4 and Payday 2), so what I decided to was to switch my desktop screen to 144Hz (screen's a G-Sync Monitor) and test with some video instead (speeds here are 71Mbps down and 19.5Mbps up so, pretty good for viewing HD video) and I was seeing the same thing. What I could also see was what is best described as 'input lag' from my mouse. Try the mouse on another PC, no issues, back on mine, lag or at least what is being displayed as lag.

Convinced that something on my PC was now playing up (I really hope it's just a corrupt .dll file I can repair) I decided to go through all the recent changes on my PC.

Firstly, started using Corsair Link on my Corsair H100i. I installed this last year and have had no end of issues with it (I still blame it for killing another Intel i7 6700K I had) namely with the pump making an insane whirring noise on start up and a stranger issue (admittedly, very rare - this happened about 3, maybe 4 times in total since September last year) where the LED will go from White to Red (without the Corsair Link, I'm told this is an error, like the pump or fans stopping) for seemingly no reason. So I finally dug out the Link cable and installed it. The pump still makes the noise but to lesser degrees and it's over much quicker (I'm also told, this is due to the upgraded Firmware). NB: heat; I have a rule originally via CoreTemp and now via Corsair Link to shut down my PC at 65 degrees Celsius and to be honest, the highest it's been this year was 64 degrees.

Secondly, I spent about half a day downloading various mods for Fallout 4, some of them graphical mods, namely the Texture optimisation mod (highly doubt this is at fault), Fallout ENB (a possible contender) and Fallout 4 ReShade (another contender) but I believe if anything, these would only impact the stuttering I'm seeing and not the sound issue.

Lastly, I decided to install the Intel Management Engine about a week ago (after I noticed the sound issue) but again I'm skeptical as to this having any impact as a) it's Intel. I tend to trust what what the publish and b) I've un-installed and re-installed a few times with no notable improvement.

What I'm looking for is not essentially a fix (although if anyone knows whats causing this, I certainly wouldn't turn away your council) but what information I need to trawl through in my PC to identify the root cause.

I have monitored resource monitor just in case my CPU/Memory is flaring up, but aside from some intermittent activity on Core0 (seems to be the only one that ever has full utilisation, but I assume that's from some program that hasn't been optimised for multi-core threading) it's solid as a rock - memory too, but I can certainly do some more recording here and post the results over. NB: I've also used the Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool 64Bit which has passed on each run.

I've also been going through the event logs on my PC, but to be honest I'm not really sure what I need to be looking at - I can see about 4 errors and a s*** ton of warnings which I can certainly break down if anyone's happy to look at them (I'll be reviewing them myself today, but I need coffee first - as I said, a LOT of warnings to go through).

Furmark has also been suggested to see if a problem arises from testing, so I'll be looking to download that later on too.

So, tl;dr - my PC's stuttering, I've done some basic checks, but if anyone's got any other idea's, please let me know.

Thanks all.

 

[Vladimir Tess]

I see that you are experiencing issues w/ the sound and the video. I say, you pop in the linux CD, run it, and see what you get. To break down:

If you see that sound is good and there are no problems w/ sound and video and it acts normal, you will get a better idea that it is less likely a hardware problem and more of a software issue. I would start here first if I were you. Some one else may start at reinstalling the whole windows.

Sorry for a short answer.

 

[zack_gray]

No worries, thanks for getting back to me - when you say 'Linux' do you mean Windows? I have a copy of Ubuntu kicking around I can use if necessary?

 

[Vladimir Tess]

Yep, the ubuntu

 

[Karadjgne]

Last time I saw those exact same stutters, cracks, pops etc it turned out to be a grounding issue. It was a bad wire in the section from motherboard to front audio connectors that had been pinched and was shorting to case ground creating a backfeed loop in the audio.

Play some music from a hdd file via media player and see if the issue remains.

 

[zack_gray]

So, long pause in reply; apologies for that - I've tested with Ubuntu for a little while and I'm noticing some of the same errors which leads me to believe it's going to be hardware related.

The big question is; what hardware? Although I'm hearing the 'popping' noise through my headphones/speakers, I don't believe it to be the sound card as I've tested by using the motherboards sound card and I get the same whatever I use.

Looking through the forums, I seem reference to similar symptoms which ended up being PSU related - as much as I hate to admit, seeing as it's a Corsair 860i and relatively new, it could well tally up. What I notice more & more when I test, is what appears to be a gradual slowdown in performance. Now, this is a new chipset (i7 6770K - 2nd CPU, purchased in October '15) and the GPU is a state-of-the-art (whatever that means anymore) Asus Strix 980Ti which should crush anything that comes it's way bar extreme/4k settings - even then, it should it should coast along nicely at 30FPS. With this issue however, simple graphics games such as Payday 2 sometimes deteriorates in performance so much that it becomes unplayable and the only way to clear the issue (temporarily) is to reboot the PC, which will give me anywhere between 2 - 6 hours of decent gameplay (depending on the game) before the issues starts to appear again.

Now, I'm commited to replacing the PSU but my question really is; am I correct in diagnosing the PSU? I'll be downloading Speccy shortly to perform some further tests, but if anyone has any other suggestions as to what the issue might be/what further steps of analysis I should be taking, please let me know.

Thanks.

 

[TerryLaze]

Run DPC Latency Checker it will tell you if it's a driver problem and the site will tell you what steps to take.
http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
Also run task manager and look for anything suspicious,really you should play some games in windowed mode with process hacker in the background and see if a miner virus or something is starting up after a while.

 

[zack_gray]

Run DPC Latency Checker it will tell you if it's a driver problem and the site will tell you what steps to take.
http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
Also run task manager and look for anything suspicious,really you should play some games in windowed mode with process hacker in the background and see if a miner virus or something is starting up after a while.

Thanks for the reply; I've heard that DPC Latency's not yet been patched for Windows 10? I have run it previously, but had really sporadic results. Also, the documentation on Process Hacker is... sparse, to say the least. From experience, anything in particular I should be looking for?

 

[TerryLaze]

Win 10 shows up with a high base latency in the checker but still if you get huge spikes, well over the average,you know something is up.

Basically anything that consumes a lot of CPU and isn't your game,miners are build so that they only start working after a while so that it's as difficult as possible to pinpoint the problem to them.
So if you play for a while and see something pop up with high usage and stays there look it up on google and/or report it here.

 

[zack_gray]

Win 10 shows up with a high base latency in the checker but still if you get huge spikes, well over the average,you know something is up.

Basically anything that consumes a lot of CPU and isn't your game,miners are build so that they only start working after a while so that it's as difficult as possible to pinpoint the problem to them.
So if you play for a while and see something pop up with high usage and stays there look it up on google and/or report it here.

OK, cool - thanks for the info. I've run Payday for a couple hours now and I'm starting to see the stuttering issue again, but so far, nothing in the Process Hacker to pinpoint anything. Payday was way out in front of everything with 25 - 30% CPU - the issue's not been as bad today as it has been, but I'm sure that if I had more time to test today, I'd begin to see more dramatic results.

As for DPC, well the measurements flip between 1000, to 8000 (one or two as high as 12,000). Predominantly, it's at the 8000 mark, with every 5th or 6th value being 1000 and 1 out of maybe 100, being higher than 10,000. I can't tell if this is a legit value or not but from the examples posted by others it seems a little drastic.

 

[zack_gray]

Hmm, so update - no spurious activity noted so far - it looks like everything that's pushing any form of activity is legit (I'll leave the PC running for a few hours unattended and leave it unattended to see if this shows anything). Currently, nothing seems to be taxing the CPU; even running DOOM only pushes the CPU to 25 - 35% usage Max (that's with Kaspersky & AMB running in the background too) so I'm even more convinced it's hardware. That said, none of my hardware's making the tell-tale noises or showing any other form of instability I usually associate with hardware failure.

 

[zack_gray]

So, another slight update; I am seeing an 'Interrupt & DPC' process remain in Process Hacker, though from experience these aren't really a problem until they become a whole percent and so far, it's averaging at about 0.40% of total CPU usage (though, I've seen it spike at 0.70%). Interestingly, Corsair Link seems to be using about 2.25% and I've seen it spike to 7.75% - on a side note, I was planning to install the link with the PSU, as it's an 'i' series AX860; would this help in potentially analysing whether the PSU's faulty?

 

[zack_gray]

*frustrated sigh* OK, so it's not the PSU - I've replaced the device and I'm getting the exact same issues.

I'm just tempted at to keep going at this stage - get a new CPU, MOBO, GPU, RAM and SSD.

 

[zack_gray]

Right, I've also downloaded BurnIn test and PC Doctor (paid) and run tests from there, with no failures (except an Optical drive failure on a BurnIn test - assumed that was a false-positive, but removed the drive none-the-less). I've started removing all non-essential services from my PC (sound card etc) to see what I can do next, but I'm still at a loss.

As for Software, AMB and Kaspersky show no immediate threats, even on a root scan and so far, all the tests I've done, suggest there's nothing wrong with my PC.

 

[Karadjgne]

Try memtest86. You might have a ram issue, but it's not showing up until higher percentage of ram is needed or until ram gets warmed up some. Also possible the ram is slightly unstable on your board and would benefit from a slightly (0.05v) higher voltage or relaxing the timings a hair (9-9-9-27 to 9-10-9-27 etc)

 

[zack_gray]

Right, appreciate that this has been six months between updates but I fixed the issue by replacing the CPU, MoBo, RAM, PSU, GPU and SSD.

I built a new machine.

The stuttering is no longer there.