Question Unexplained sudden PC lag/stuttering & occasional crashing ?

[eshenk99]

PC has been working fine for months, then unexpectedly it just started to intermittently stutter/lag. I have really tried to solve this myself, but I am lost on this one!

SPECS
GPU: 4070 ti
CPU: R9 3900x
RAM: 32GB
MB: X570
PSU: 750W
OS: windows 10

BRIEF EXPLANATION!
The problem began "all of a sudden" and as far as I know, there was no particular event or incident that caused this. The problem has existed for days now. My PC will occasionally crash when playing a game, but the lag/stuttering is constantly happening every few seconds intermittently when I am playing a video game. I have gotten a new PSU and GPU months ago, but everything has been fine up until now.
EDIT: forgot to mention I also recently bought new RAM but that was months ago

WHAT I HAVE ATTEMPTED!
1. I switched my GPU to another that I have and the problem still persists. Therefore that rules out the GPU.
2. I reset/reinstalled windows and the problem WENT AWAY for hours for the first time. I thought I solved the problem. eventually I loaded up VALORANT and all of a sudden the problem reappeared and won't go away even if I'm not loading a video game.
3. I used MSI afterburner to monitor CPU temperature and I saw nothing concerning.
4. my RAM is running at proper speed
5. dskchk discovered no problems, im running on an SSD
6. a malware scan discovered nothing as well
7. updating windows before reinstalling it had no effect btw
8. FPS and network are perfectly fine and unaffected. this is not FPS dropping
9. task manager shows nothing concerning, usage of all components are appropriate

MY THOUGHTS
considering the only thing that solved my problem temporarily was resetting/reinstalling windows 10, I believe its probably related to that. simply restarting pc never seems to have an effect. The problem seems to have progressed overtime, but that very well could be my imagination. After all of this and I may have forgot to mention a few things, I am completely lost.

 

[Fix_that_Glitch]

Did you try using one stick of ram at a time?

 

[Murissokah]

When troubleshooting I find it useful to leave monitoring tools like Perfmon running in the background, looking at things like disk queue length, memory pages / sec and CPU stats to see if anything changes when the hiccups occur.

I'd run gpu-z and monitor the GPU too, even if the GPU itself is not the problem there could be driver or software issues causing hiccups with it ( eg. I've had slowdowns palying Dota on 4090 because some app got focused on the desktop and the system decided it was best to leave the GPU at lowest performace mode after that). So just to be sure it would be good to see if nothing changes on the GPU stats when the issue happens.

You can also look for errors in Windows event viewer that could give hints about where the issue originates.

 

[eshenk99]

Did you try using one stick of ram at a time?

I haven't, but after doing so it worked. I tried both ram sticks in a single slot and it works fine. I tried all slots and they are all fine with both ram sticks. that problem only happens in dual channel in slots 2 and 4 (i do not have dual channel in slots 1 and 3 if that is a thing).

 

[Fix_that_Glitch]

I haven't, but after doing so it worked. I tried both ram sticks in a single slot and it works fine. I tried all slots and they are all fine with both ram sticks. that problem only happens in dual channel in slots 2 and 4 (i do not have dual channel in slots 1 and 3 if that is a thing).

Just so I understand correctly, you have narrowed it down to dual channel being the problem? Have you tried changing the speed of the memory, xmp off, checking the the speeds one stick at a time and in pairs?