Question PC stuttering and freezing when gaming ?

[Brand893]

Hello, so my brand new gaming PC keeps having strange stutter / Freeze events and I can’t tell what’s causing it. It was prebuilt by iBuypower.

Example, random events like loading into a call of duty game, loading into a new area in Resident evil 4, I’ve even had it happen in smaller games like Minecraft or project zomboid. It seems to happen more often than not, in call of duty though. It seems completely random with no consistency in time playing and I have never been able to duplicate it right away. What happens is, upon starting an event such as starting to load into a game in CoD and such, it sometimes will complexly freeze for a second and then stutter to the point of getting like 1-2 fps. Sometimes, the mouse will still be completely moveable with no issues to that and if I can manage to minimize the game, I can even see apps respond such as the clear box forming around an app when I move the curser over it. But I can never open anything without making it worse/ eventually black screen. Never had a BSOD yet. Audio continues to loop as well during the events. It usually will not stop until I hard reset the pc.

Pc:
I9 13900k
7900 xtx
32 GB XPG 5600 ram
Gigabyte z790 mobo

I used to mess with settings within AmD software lowering voltage and raising clocks, but I’ve since stopped that and used one of the base “Undervolt” settings available and it still happened. I’m trying at the moment to not change any settings and run the 7900 xtx stock and see if it continues again. The last couple times it happened, I’d boot back in and I’d get a notification saying Radeon settings went to default due to an unexpected system failure which is what leads me to thinking it’s the graphics card. But other times before that, it wasn’t showing that notification.

I’ve tried /SFC scannow and it came up with nothing. The graphics card drivers are up to date. The mobo seems to be up to date. I’m using an XMP profile to get to 5600 but that’s what’s the ram is advertised for. I have the processor set to max performance mode in the mobo settings.

Does anyone know what I can do to narrow down what’s going on? The only thing I don’t know if it’s related or not, the pc starts slow. It takes 28-30 seconds according to task manager. My last pc with a ryzen 5600 and a 3070 started in literally 7 seconds. Both the pcs have NVME SSDs with windows installed on them. I cannot figure out what’s happening if there’s anyone willing to help me figure this out, I would appreciate that.

 

[Lutfij]

Gigabyte have a number of Z790 chipset boards, which one do you have? You can use CPU-Z to show that info, alongside the current BIOS version for your motherboard.

Might want to remove the side panels and see if you can identify the make and model of your PSU. How is that processor being cooled in that prebuilt? Use DDU to remove all GPU drivers off of your platform and then manually reinstall the latest driver sourced from Nvidia's support site in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

 

[Brand893]

Gigabyte have a number of Z790 chipset boards, which one do you have? You can use CPU-Z to show that info, alongside the current BIOS version for your motherboard.

Might want to remove the side panels and see if you can identify the make and model of your PSU. How is that processor being cooled in that prebuilt? Use DDU to remove all GPU drivers off of your platform and then manually reinstall the latest driver sourced from Nvidia's support site in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

Gigabyte have a number of Z790 chipset boards, which one do you have? You can use CPU-Z to show that info, alongside the current BIOS version for your motherboard.

Might want to remove the side panels and see if you can identify the make and model of your PSU. How is that processor being cooled in that prebuilt? Use DDU to remove all GPU drivers off of your platform and then manually reinstall the latest driver sourced from Nvidia's support site in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

Thank you for your response, this has been so troubling for me. Okay so I have a high power HPV 1050GD 80 plus gold power supply that and a Z790 UD AC Bios Version 3.5. Processor is being cooled by an NZXT Kracken X73. Another bit of info, I have a 2TB WD Black SN 850X M.2 NVME with windows installed on it.
I was willing to live with the very strange slow startup, but the random freezing and crashing at seemingly completely random times has got me extremely worried about the PC.

 

[Lutfij]

Bios Version 3.5
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/Z790-UD-AC-rev-10/support#support-dl-bios
They don't have a version 3.5 listed. You sure you're reading off the BIOS version right?

I have a 2TB WD Black SN 850X M.2 NVME with windows installed on it
This drive a carry over or one with a clean install of the OS? If clean, where did you source the installer for the OS?

high power HPV 1050GD 80 plus gold
How old is this unit?

 

[Brand893]

Bios Version 3.5
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/Z790-UD-AC-rev-10/support#support-dl-bios
They don't have a version 3.5 listed. You sure you're reading off the BIOS version right?

I have a 2TB WD Black SN 850X M.2 NVME with windows installed on it
This drive a carry over or one with a clean install of the OS? If clean, where did you source the installer for the OS?

high power HPV 1050GD 80 plus gold
How old is this unit?

I’m so sorry for late reply, I’ve been on a vacation. You’re right, I was looking at the wrong thing with that 3.5 number. Bios version says F3K. The whole computer is roughly 2 months old as that’s how long I’ve had it since iBuyPower shipped it. As for the age of the individual components, I don’t know unless there’s actually a way to check that. That being said, iBuyPower installed the OS before shipping it. I will say, I did what you suggested with cleanly removing and installing video driver but I used AMD cleanup utility. So far since that, I haven’t had a single issue with freezing. (Hopefully that doesn’t jinx it) the startup is still slow, but as long as it’s stable and not freezing or crashing then I’m fine. But if you have any other suggestions or info based off that info, let me know. I plan to give it a month or so of regular use again after the clean driver install before I assume it’s fixed. Thank you for the help so far.

 

[Lutfij]

I did make a typo there, above, I was trying to say AMD but typed out Nvidia. Perhaps I crossed AMD with Nvidia as I saw that RTX3070 mentioned at the bottom of your OP. Regardless, you use DDU to remove all GPU drivers, then install with drivers from GPU chip maker's support site(not AIB partner support site).

 

[Brand893]

I did make a typo there, above, I was trying to say AMD but typed out Nvidia. Perhaps I crossed AMD with Nvidia as I saw that RTX3070 mentioned at the bottom of your OP. Regardless, you use DDU to remove all GPU drivers, then install with drivers from GPU chip maker's support site(not AIB partner support site).

That’s essentially what I did, just used AMD cleanup utility instead of DDU. They accomplish the same thing to my understanding. So far so good, hopefully that’s the fix. Otherwise I may just resort to a complete reinstall of windows. I’m not really sure what to do next if it continues.

 

[Brand893]

Update, it has happened again. This has been very frustrating. However, I managed to fight the freeze and stutter just enough and after about 20 minutes of trying, I managed to hit cntrl + alt + delete enough times that the menu actually came up and I was able to hit the sign out button. That completely unfroze the desktop and I was able to sign back in perfectly fine as if nothing happened. I went straight into Event Viewer and found a few interesting things that have never shown up before.
Around the exact time the freeze occurred, an “Information” popped up; “Kernel-General - The Access history in hive \??\C:\Users\danfo\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.MicrosoftOfficeHub_8wekyb3d8bbwe\Settings\settings.dat was cleared updating 3 keys and creating 1 modified pages.

just a few minutes after that, event viewer showed a few more things.

“Error - Application Hang - The Program SystemSettings.exe version 10.0.22621.1555 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel.”

“Error - Application Hang - The program explorer.exe version 10.0.22621.1485 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel.”

These two things came around the time I was able to sign out.
“Error - Faulting Application name: GameBar.exe, version 5.823.3261.0”

“Error - Faulting Application name: GbtCloudMatrix.exe, version 22.9.21.1”

It appears, all throughout the 20 minutes or so I was trying to struggle through the severe unresponsive stuttering these things were populating into event viewer.

“Information - Attempted to add URL (http://*:2869/upnp/eventing/) to URL group (0xFE00000620000001) status 0x0. Process Id 0x4CC Executable path \Device\Harddiskvolume4\windows\system32\svchost.exe, user LOCAL SERVICE.” This message was posted several times over various minutes while I was struggling through the stutters and the only thing changing between the messages was the URL group number.

If anyone could please tell me what’s going on, that would be amazing. I feel like the answer is somewhere in those event viewer findings. I have a feeling it’s an application in the background causing the instability and not actually a video driver issue. Seeing as It completely cleared out when I signed out and the applications got closed. Anyone know what this means?