What Computer Component can cause all games to lag for 10 seconds at a time every few minutes

[Jack_205]

Hi, recently i have been getting alot of frame drops in games (overwatch, Rainbow 6, Squad..ect)
for the good majority my frames will be 60+ and very playable but every few minutes my game will lag and drop to 20-30 frames for 10 or so seconds and then go back to normal like nothing happened, i have recently upgraded from a GTX 980 to 1080 and i feel like that might of caused it but i wanted to ask for a better opinion

this affect is not noticable when on the desktop and or not running a game

Any help would be appretiated

PC Specs:
CPU= Fx8350
GPU=GTX 1080
Ram=16Gb DDr3
MotherBoard= MSI 970A-G43
Power= 750w
1TB HDD
200GB SSD

 

[mjslakeridge]

Just a guess here, but it could be thermal throttling. This happens when the CPU gets too hot and it lowers the frequency of the cores to protect itself. Do you have a good CPU cooler? Is it attached securely to the cpu and motherboard? How long has the cooler been installed on the cpu? Could be the thermal paste needs to be replaced. For AMD cpus, it seems that only AMD Overdrive gives accurate temperature information. AMD Overdrive shows you the Thermal Margin, which is how many degrees you are away from the maximum safe temp for the cpu, so a larger number is better.

Do you still have the old GPU? You could try installing that to see if the problem persists, but I doubt that is the case.

 

[imrazor]

Another possible culprit is a background process running every few minutes. You can monitor this with Task Manager and watch your RAM, CPU and disk usage, or you can try a utility like Razer's Cortex, which minimizes the number of running background services and processes.