Radeon HD 7850 Frame Hitching/Skips/Lock-ups

[peanutreaper486]

Recently, while playing various games, I notice many hitches and skips in frames. This is everywhere from my framerate being in the 70s/80s, then stops rendering frames, then continues about 600-1100ms later.

The skips are very random, and occur whenever they feel like it. Games that I experience the skips in: Counter Strike: Global Offensive, TERA, Dark Souls, Chivalry Medieval Warfare, Borderlands 1/2, even Minecraft; Both vanilla and heavily modded.

Specs:
Motherboard: ASRock Extreme3 970 AM3+.
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 @ 3.8ghz.
RAM: 8GB DDR3 Dual-Channel @ 1600mhz.
GPU: Radeon HD 7850 1GB.
HDD: Seagate 250GB 7200RPM / Seagate 2TB 7200RPM.
PSU: Rosewill HIVE-650 650W.
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64.
Resolution: 1920x1080. (Primary screen.) 1920x1080. (Secondary screen.)

I have also tried various Catalyst builds, ranging from 12.10 to 13.12, with 13.12 being the worst. I uninstalled older drivers by deleting the folders left over and removing certain registry entries, along with DriverSweeper. It's a long process.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[peanutreaper486]

I spoke a little bit too soon; I found the issue to be in the software that I used to control my 7850's fan, Asus GPU Tweak. By turning this off, my games have ceased hitching.