PC Stuttering

[makrish]

Not sure where else to put this..

My PC stutters. A lot. No matter what it's doing, and how many processes are open, it stutters.

My hardware is as follows:

CPU: i7 920 2.66GHz @ 3.35 GHz

Cooler: Antec H50

Primary HDD: Corsair Force 60GB SSD

Secondary HDDs: Western Digital 500GB HDD & Samsung 1TB HDD

PSU: Antec 850W CP850

GPU: Sapphire 5970

RAM: Corsair 3x2gb @ 1600MHz

OS: Windows Enterprise 64bit

I bought the PC two years ago, and have updated parts occasionally over the two years. My latest addition was the SSD a few months ago. My rig had been working perfectly until a week ago. I first noticed some stutter in Deus Ex: HR, but I thought that it was normal, seeing as a few of my friends (with newer rigs) had the same problem. A couple days ago I started noticing stutter in films I'd watch, or just moving my mouse. I've tried getting rid of any unwanted processes, but it doesn't seem to help.

My films and music are on my 1TB HDD, and games are on my 500GB. I doubt it's a PSU problem, or RAM, which makes me think that it's either the CPU or my SSD. I've run an antivirus scan, ccleaner, and defragged both of the HDD's.

Going onto system manager, there's no process overly using the CPU, or RAM, but when I go into the disk tab in resource monitor, there are these random spikes.

Anyone got any ideas? Is it my CPU, or could it be that my SSD is dying?

 

[farrengottu]

play a movie and pull up task manager, go to the processes tab and click the "CPU", at the top of the cpu collum. so that it organizes based on most processor use. then see what spikes to the top of the list during or right before a stutter.

ive had simular problems in the past that could not be identified this way. but i gave up and reinstalled windows. its often faster than tracking down the problem.

oh and the cpu wont stutter it will stop when its the problem. and ive never heard of an ssd causing long delays when dieing. they just die. or lose some data.

 

[makrish]

On another note, I rebooted my PC, and it will no longer boot up. It gets past the BIOS screen, but it gets to a black screen with five blue lines across the top, plus a lot of glitching.

I thought it wasn't the CPU as the first core (of the 8 virtual ones) was the only one which had activity on it, and wasn't spiking that much, whereas the disk had constant activity, even when I wasn't doing anything.

The fact that I got past the bios makes me think it isn't the CPU and is instead the SSD. Heard of an SSD dying after a couple of months before?

 

[farrengottu]

the lines and the glitching makes me think gpu but it could be the northbridge. since thats how the gpu talks to the cpu. for the cpu its normal for the first few cores to get all the attention my computer has 4 cores + hyperthreading and 3 of those virtual cores never get used. and of the physical cores generally only the first two do.
it could be software. throw in a windows install disk and see if it loads. cuz that doesnt use the hard drive till you go to install. you could try installing windows on an old drive or if your willing to reinstall on your current you could give that a try. just to see if its something in windows/your ssd or if its gpu/northbridge.

somewhere around 3% of ssds die in the first 6 months. ive heard of people that buy 20 for the office upgrades and 3/4ths of them die.

 

[makrish]

Just a quick update, the PC booted properly. I left it on the glitchy screen, it restarted, and it booted up correctly, but with some glitching at the top of the black loading screen. There isn't any glitching at any other time, by the way, not during POST or even when Windows loads.

SSDLife seems to read the SSD health as 100%... HD Tune reads no bad sectors.

I'll post an update if/when I find anything, thanks for the help.