- Mar 21, 2016
- 8
- 0
- 1,510
This issue began about a week ago, 2 weeks or so after buying the laptop and upgrading the ssd. First the specs:
My system
I first noticed a new sort of sluggishness while browsing the web. Pages were taking far longer than usual to load, especially images on the pages. This happened no matter the browser, regardless of whether I was on WiFi or an ethernet connection. Speedtests were fast as were sustained downloads. The next place I noticed the slowness was playing a game (WoW) where when I loaded a new area, textures were taking a good 3 to 5 extra seconds to load. Turning down the texture resolution to low improved this issue. The GPU intensive parts of the game were still working fine, just the texture loading had problems.
Because of this I suspected it was an SSD problem. I had installed the SM951 myself after buying it and it had worked beautifully the first two weeks before this happened. Still, this wouldn't explain the slow webpage loading. I ran various benchmarks on various components and what I found was that something was clearly wrong, but it wasn't clear exactly what.
Here's one of the benchmarks (ignore the graphics part of it; it only tested the integrated gpu): http://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/901007
This seemed to suggest that my SSD wasn't the issue. Running tests specifically on the SSD I got quite fast sequential read/write speeds (~2000 MB/s) but the random read and write speeds were pretty abysmal. I think this is linked to the slow texture loading, though I don't necessarily think the SSD is the culprit.
It almost looks like the CPU is the issue. I thought maybe it was being throttled in software so I reinstalled Windows, disabled all the power saving capabilities, updated all drivers, booted in safe mode and watched the CPU hit 100% freq and 100% usage during the benchmarks. But still I was getting the slow results you can see in that benchmark (http://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/901007).
Non internet-enabled applications also seem slower than usual for what it's worth. Windows Explorer takes just a bit too long to open, etc. Boot times are still relatively quick despite all this.
Summary
My system
- + Dell XPS 15 9550 laptop
+ OS: Windows 10 Home
+ STORAGE: Samsung SM951 M.2 256 GB PCIe 3.0 SSD (AHCI, not NVMe)
+ CPU: i5-6300HQ
+ GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M with 2GB GDDR5
+ Integrated GPU: Intel 530
+ RAM: 8GB DDR4-2133MHz
+ CHIPSET: Intel C230 Series
I first noticed a new sort of sluggishness while browsing the web. Pages were taking far longer than usual to load, especially images on the pages. This happened no matter the browser, regardless of whether I was on WiFi or an ethernet connection. Speedtests were fast as were sustained downloads. The next place I noticed the slowness was playing a game (WoW) where when I loaded a new area, textures were taking a good 3 to 5 extra seconds to load. Turning down the texture resolution to low improved this issue. The GPU intensive parts of the game were still working fine, just the texture loading had problems.
Because of this I suspected it was an SSD problem. I had installed the SM951 myself after buying it and it had worked beautifully the first two weeks before this happened. Still, this wouldn't explain the slow webpage loading. I ran various benchmarks on various components and what I found was that something was clearly wrong, but it wasn't clear exactly what.
Here's one of the benchmarks (ignore the graphics part of it; it only tested the integrated gpu): http://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/901007
This seemed to suggest that my SSD wasn't the issue. Running tests specifically on the SSD I got quite fast sequential read/write speeds (~2000 MB/s) but the random read and write speeds were pretty abysmal. I think this is linked to the slow texture loading, though I don't necessarily think the SSD is the culprit.
It almost looks like the CPU is the issue. I thought maybe it was being throttled in software so I reinstalled Windows, disabled all the power saving capabilities, updated all drivers, booted in safe mode and watched the CPU hit 100% freq and 100% usage during the benchmarks. But still I was getting the slow results you can see in that benchmark (http://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/901007).
Non internet-enabled applications also seem slower than usual for what it's worth. Windows Explorer takes just a bit too long to open, etc. Boot times are still relatively quick despite all this.
Summary
- + Slow browsing
+ Slow random read/write speeds (but fast sequential read/write)
+ Poor CPU performance
- + Checked actual internet speed
+ Made sure SSD was not nearly full (75% free)
+ Checked SSD performance (fast sequential read/write)
+ Watched resource monitor during slow loading event and didn't see anything obviously bottlenecking the process
+ Checked discrete GPU performance and it's still fine (though doesn't show up on above benchmark)
+ Checked performance on battery vs. plugged in
+ Disabled all power saving software like Intel SpeedStep, TurboBoost, and C-States
+ Updated all drivers!
+ Reinstalled Windows 10
+ Tried Windows High Contrast Mode (on the advice of some forum post; obviously didn't work)
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