[SOLVED] Why does my friend have stutters in every game?

[ProPlayerGR]

Hello everyone. So a friend of mine has stutters in every game he plays and that problem wasn't always there. It started happening in the past 2 months. His specs are:
Ryzen 5 3600x
Gigabyte Aorus Pro X570
GTX 1060
Corsair RM850x
Samsung evo 850 SSD 250GB
Toshiba 1TB HDD
Gskill Trident Z RGB 32GB 3200MHZ
Corsair H80i GT
Corsair Obsidian 750D
He ran a cinebench r15 test and his max cpu temp was 75 degrees. While in game his temps are 60-70 degrees on the cpu and 50-60 on the gpu. He was using the stock cooler for a while and I don't recall him having any stutters then, but when he installed the AIO the stutters started happening(I think this is when they started happening. His AIO is 5 years old so that's possibly a problem). He has stutters in Rainbow Six Siege, Dark souls 3 and some other games that he plays crash after 10 minutes or so(for example Factorio, Battlefield 1). I tried to give as much info as I can. If you need more just tell me. Does anyone know what may be the issue here? Thanks in advance.

 

[rgd1101]

how full is the ssd?
what resolution?
what the cpu/gpu usage during the game?

 

[ProPlayerGR]

how full is the ssd?
what resolution?
what the cpu/gpu usage during the game?

So my friend tested Dark Souls 3 and he had a lot of stutters again. He used MSI Afterburner to monitor the cpu/gpu usage etc.
Resolution: 1080p 144hz
The ssd has 150gb of free space and the hdd has 155gb of 931gb free.
The cpu usage on all cores was 30-40% most of the time, but when the stutters happened it dropped below 10% on almost all cores. He told me that the second before the stutter happened one core hit 94% usage. Max temp on the cpu was 64 degrees.
As for the gpu, usage was 60% and the temp was 62 degrees without the stutters. The second his game stuttered, the GPU usage dropped to 0% and the temp was 65 degrees.
I think Dark Souls 3 is a great example because it stutters all the time on his pc, so I don't think he needs to test other games as well. If you need more info just ask! Thanks so much for the help!

 

[geofelt]

Stutters are usually because of a cpu performance problem.
Problems after a time playing are usually thermal related.
Problems that happen after all was well previously are usually related to some sort of a change.

As I read the post, an aio was installed to help with temperatures that may or may not have been a problem.
Over time an aio can be expected to have issues. The mechanical pump may no longer be efficient, There can be coolant leaks or clogged pipes.
Since the issues started with the aio, I suggest you replace it.
A H80 is not a very good aio in the first place.
Most any good air tower with a 120mm fan will perform equally well.

The case is a good one for air cooling.
Most any air cooler with a 140mm fan will be all you need.
I like the noctua coolers, the NH-D15s is as good as it gets.

And...
Be careful how you interpret task manager cpu utilizations.
Windows will spread the activity of a single thread over all available threads.
So, if you had a game that was single threaded and cpu bound, it would show up on a quad core processor as 25%
utilization across all 4 threads.
leading you to think your bottleneck was elsewhere.
It turns our that few games can USEFULLY use more than 4-6 threads.
How can you tell how well threaded your games or apps are?
One way is to disable one thread and see how you do.

You can do this in the windows msconfig boot advanced options option.
You will need to reboot for the change to take effect. Set the number of processors to less than you have.
This will tell you how sensitive your games are to the benefits of many threads.
If you see little difference, it tells you that you will not benefit from more cores.
Likely, a better clock rate will be more important.

 

[ProPlayerGR]

Stutters are usually because of a cpu performance problem.
Problems after a time playing are usually thermal related.
Problems that happen after all was well previously are usually related to some sort of a change.

As I read the post, an aio was installed to help with temperatures that may or may not have been a problem.
Over time an aio can be expected to have issues. The mechanical pump may no longer be efficient, There can be coolant leaks or clogged pipes.
Since the issues started with the aio, I suggest you replace it.
A H80 is not a very good aio in the first place.
Most any good air tower with a 120mm fan will perform equally well.

The case is a good one for air cooling.
Most any air cooler with a 140mm fan will be all you need.
I like the noctua coolers, the NH-D15s is as good as it gets.

And...
Be careful how you interpret task manager cpu utilizations.
Windows will spread the activity of a single thread over all available threads.
So, if you had a game that was single threaded and cpu bound, it would show up on a quad core processor as 25%
utilization across all 4 threads.
leading you to think your bottleneck was elsewhere.
It turns our that few games can USEFULLY use more than 4-6 threads.
How can you tell how well threaded your games or apps are?
One way is to disable one thread and see how you do.

You can do this in the windows msconfig boot advanced options option.
You will need to reboot for the change to take effect. Set the number of processors to less than you have.
This will tell you how sensitive your games are to the benefits of many threads.
If you see little difference, it tells you that you will not benefit from more cores.
Likely, a better clock rate will be more important.

Thanks for the help. He (my friend) replaced the stock cooler with the H80 because he already had it from his previous build and he didn't want to throw it away. His previous build had a fx 8320 so that's why he bought a H80i in the first place. When he had the stock cooler on the ryzen he didn't have temp issues at all, he just wanted to use his AIO as I mentioned above. By the way, the utilisations that I listed were not from task manager. My friend used MSI afterburner to monitor the utilisations, the temps etc, while he was playing. Task manager wasn't used. But thanks for the help, he actually wanted to buy a new cooler as he's had that AIO for 5 years, but I convinced him to keep it. I'll let him know.