Question Random lags in every game

TheBloodReaper

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Oct 2, 2016
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4,510
As the title states, I get random lag spikes in every game I play. Be it CS:GO, World of Warcraft, Assetto Corsa, DiRT or Valorant - it's all the same. I get decent framerates (70-80) for the most part, except for an interval of 4-5 seconds in which my fps drops to 9-10. It's not a thermal issue, as I regularly clean my laptop and reapply thermal paste (I use MX-4). It's not a driver issue either, as I always keep them up to date. I use Bitdefender, so I guess it's not a virus either. My specs are as follows:

i7-6700HQ @ 2.60 GHz
GTX 960M
16 GB of RAM (Used to be 8 GB, upgraded it because I thought it was a ram issue)

I think worth mentioning is that I've noticed slight problems with my GPU. Last summer it had all these weird artefacts, which I blamed on thermals. Sure enough, once I let it cool down everything was back to normal. Now, a few days ago I had an external monitor connected and I decided to play some Valorant while having Task Manager up on my second screen. And sure enough, while lagging I noticed with my peripheral vision some big shifts around the Task Manager. It's been like this for a few years, and lately it's been driving me mad. I'd really love a solution to my problem!