Hi! I have a problem. My gaming PC keep stuttering. When I start a game (its original) it is good, lets say I have 80FPS. I have a pc that can run almost every game. So after playing about 10 or so minutes, the fps drops down to 15 and the game is unplayable like that. This stuttering lasts about 1 minute and after that its normal again. After that 10 minutes the stuttering comes up again. And it goes on and on. I barely can handle it in singleplayers but online is horrible with this problem. I have the latest drivers on the PC. But it isnt at every game fortunately. I can say it isnt a VRAM issue, when my 1GB is not enough, because i run these games without the stuttering before. Please help if you can! My PC: Motherboard: Asus F2A55, CPU: AMD A8-5600K 3.60GHz, RAM: Kingston 8GB HyperX Plug n Play 1600MHz CL9, GPU: Gigabyte GTX 650

When it happens is the whole computer slowed down to a crawl?

Sounds like it could be a CPU or GPU overheating issue, or a power supply problem. What kind of PSU do you have and how old is it?

Have you monitored your temperatures during gameplay to see if they are extremely high?

Honestly - it could be a number of different things. Temps is where I would start, though.

If its stuttering and I listen to music, the music has no problem. So I think its only in games.

My power supply is a Chieftec GPS-500A8. Its almost one and a half years old, and I had no problems with it. It can handle the pc Im sure. Yes I did monitor my temeratures. The GPU doesn't go above 50°C and the CPU's max temperature was 74°C, although the average was around 50°C.

If you have access to another power supply, I'd definitely try that. Have you uninstalled and reinstalled video drivers? Motherboard chipset drivers installed cleanly?

Well i dont have access to an another PSU. I did reinstall the drivers, now i use a more stable nVidia driver (340.52).

What kind of hard drive are you using?

@hmoney001: Seagate 1TB 7200rpm

I'd put money on it being a bad PSU. It happens all the time, and a cheapo/budget/no-name PSU failing is a common cause of the type of problem you're experiencing.

I've been building PCs since the early 90s and I've never even heard of Chieftec until this thread. Looking at the specs on the manufacturer's site, this thing is indeed a garbage PSU. It's barely 80% efficient and not certified, and it only has a two year warranty when the standard for PSUs is either five or seven years. Chieftec lists the bare minimum of technical specifications, and there isn't even any further information available such as an efficiecny curve anywhere on their site. I recommend replacing it as soon as possible with something from a reputable brand such as Corsair, EVGA, or Seasonic.

This is the third recent post from people with budget/no-name power supplies having strange freezing, stuttering, blue screening, or other "inexplicable" problems. Please, if anyone happens to be reading this and you're about to build a PC, just spend the extra $10 or $20 and buy a reputable brand. Having a good PSU is so important, and getting a reliable one isn't even that expensive.

I agree with MB there. I build several PCs a week for my company and SeaSonics are my favorite and sturdy and reliable.

So you guys are telling me, it is definitely a power supply problem? Would a power supply cause the stuttering?

I'd never say definitely, but quite likely. You are probably getting weaker power than its rated for. It sounds like it hits you when the PC is taxed harder and be ok otherwise. That *usually* points to power. If you were getting crashes or weird errors or from gentle use that would probably point to some other piece of the PC.

@mb: Bit of an aside, but while you might not have heard of Chieftec, that power supply (as far as I know based on the Tom's Hardware round-up - http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/power-supply-psu-brands,review-33002-5.html) is manufactured by Channel Well, who you should have heard of - they actually manufacture a lot of products for one of the brands you've noted, Corsair, among others. Obviously they won't have built it to the same standards and specifications as non-budget models, but it's interesting to note. I'd recommend anyone looking to buy a PSU has a quick look through those pages. And yes, don't skimp on the PSU - it's the heart of your PC, is connected to everything, and you don't want a fire hazard.

Back on-topic - your problems can be caused by a lot of different issues, but yes a defective PSU can definitely be a cause.

Do I need a more powerful power supply or about 500W is enough? Can yo guys think of another thing that can cause the problem, or its definitely the power supply?

They can't tell you it's definitely power supply man, no IT guy is going to make a definite diagnosis on a piece of hardware they've never seen :) (I work in IT too). There's all sorts of things that can cause poor performance, without having the pc in your hands it's impossible to give a definitive answer. Do you have access to another computer or PSU?

I dont have access to another power supply or another PC.

I did another montioring in a problematic game. My CPU was around 55°C, about 90% usage. My GPU was around 48°C, about 75% usage. By the way i do appreciate the help guys :)

Nothing wrong with those load temps. Ultimately while that PSU is a bit of a turd a bad unit isn't going to manifest symptoms like your describing, the machine will simply BSOD if a major component looses a significant amount of juice. You are possibly looking at some kind of RAM limitation resulting in a lot of disk paging which would explain the random/self recovering nature of the issue or some kind of unexpected clock speed reduction (possibly another application overriding the GPU clock speed to a lower power mode intermittently).

I'd grab something to log your GPU and CPU clock speeds and usage in game and see if there is any big drops.

Check you're pagefile settings. I'm no diagnosing wiz at all, but for whatever reason when I read your post, I had a feeling pagefiling may be an issue.

Yeah, PSU problems = BSOD, not stuttering. Overheating would cause artifacts and the like before any stuttering. If it's something you run into over time, I'd also say you're running into memory issues.

What games are you running?

@guanophobic: @korwin Here is a case from just this month where a bad PSU was causing slowdowns and instability issues, but not necessarily always locking up or bsod'ing the PC.

I've also seen this personally in at least two cases - a bad PSU causing strange instability problems but not straight up blue screening the PC. So, it absolutely is possible.

http://www.giantbomb.com/pc/3045-94/forums/help-diagnosing-a-pc-problem-solved-1774519/#21

@barely_aliveeus: For your system 500watt is more then enough. I always recommend gold efficiency power supplies or higher but you would be fine with a bronze rated one.

There's every chance that your PSU is causing those problems. A bad PSU can be a huge pain in the ass. Getting a decent replacement shouldn't cost too much. If modularity isn't a major concern, the Seasonic S12G series is dirt cheap and still has excellent build quality and components.

Well i don't know much about APU's but I looked up the CPU you posted and it has integrated graphics, i'm not sure but maybe there could be a conflict happening? Especially with AMD graphics drivers with an nvidia Card?

What game are you playing and what program are you using to monitor temps? Have you tried lowering settings and playing for a while to see how the performance is?

Temperatures look fine, try shutting down unnecessary background applications. Also check Windows Event Viewer for any errors or system alerts that could be related to your issue.

I'd definitely look into the PSU side of things. Almost every time I've had some unexplained random instability, a faulty PSU has been the cause.

In fact I had to swap one out this morning - My gaming PC had been getting random freezing and GPU driver crashes with both my old GPU and new one. A new PSU has fixed it, and I went as far as to put the old PSU in a spare PC (which was totally stable before) and exactly the same problems occurred.

Guys thank you for all the help! I am going to buy a new power supply next month. It will be a Corsair CX500M. Hopefully the stuttering will dissapear with this new PSU. By the way bare in mind, these temperatures were monitored in a 33-34°C room.

@barely_aliveeus: Hopefully that'll sort things out. A good PSU is the heartbeat of your PC.

isn't 74 c a bit high for an amd cpu? dont they usually have a limit around 62?

@devildoll: I initially asked him if he had been monitoring his temperatures during gameplay, and I didn't see the response...he said "The CPUs max temperature was 74C." I'm not sure if he meant that the AMD maximum recommended temperature was 74c (which it is) or that it was hitting 74c during gameplay. If so, then he definitely has temperature problem, which is the very first thing I suggested in this thread. His response about temperatures wasn't clear, at least to me.

I dont know what game or program caused the 74c but i also said i did another monitoring while gaming and the temperatures were ok.

If you ran the games without stuttering before than either something in your software environment has changed or there is a hardware issue. I would try and eliminate software suspects before replacing hardware. The most likely suspect here would be graphics/resolution settings but I haven't seen any mention of those in this thread. Have you tried lower resolutions/refresh rates/graphic settings just to see if you can eliminate the stuttering? It would, at the least, be informative.

And during that session with ok temperatures, you still got stuttering?

@cwniles:

Yes I already tried to lower my settings and it didn't work.

@devildoll: Yes I still got the stuttering when my temperatures are not that bad.

@barely_aliveeus:

You would probably benefit from posting in an actual PC support forum where you have a knowledgeable user base who have the time, skill and inclination to help you with these matters. Nobody can efficiently troubleshoot this issue with the limited details you provide....I don't think OS has even been mentioned (not that the problem is OS related but still, don't know what OS you are on) Unless the person is the sort who has you run a system info tool and forward them the logs/snapshots etc., you are just going to continue to receive vague questions and suggestions.

Years back (10+) when I was actively building and troubleshooting PC's, I would use the forums at Tom's Hardware along with some freeware tools from CPUID (CPU-Z is the system info tool and HWMonitor monitors voltages etc) which can be really helpful (essential really) when diagnosing such an issue. http://www.cpuid.com/softwares.html Your motherboard may have come with something that does what HWMonitor does (if you installed it) so you can use that but you really need a system info tool to capture all the fine details for diagnosis. There are quite a few freeware utilities available., use what you like.

This page at Tom's Hardware walks you through some essential steps and would be a good starting point....check into getting some logging software running and then running the Furmark or CUDA GPU stress test...many more good suggestions (memtest etc) contained within. http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-2583515/basic-troubleshooting-layman.html

Maybe it is your PS and once you get a new one the problem will go away but I wouldn't bet anything substantial on that.

Good luck.

APU + GPU with a GTX 650. That APU has an onboard AMD Radeon HD 7560D, you might wanna try disabling the onboard GPU so that the game is running on the GTX 650, not the one thats on the APU chip. If a game doesn't know what GPU to use, or worse, trying to use both graphics processors, it will cause issues like this. You may also want to check conflicting graphics drivers, if you have both AMD and Nvidia drivers installed, they usually always conflict, you would need to uninstall the AMD catalatist driver set, and you will need to do that, in safe mode with a proper driver uninstaller (reccomend using DDU - display driver uninstaller).

Those temps on the CPU are fine... Been using AMD CPUs for over 10 years, and only when the temps reach and exceed 78-80C+ will you have issues resulting in a heating issue... The recomended Temps for an AMD CPU is 62C on their website, and this is for the longativity and to meet the lifespan warrenty for their CPUs, not general running warnings.

Hope you are able to check on this, hope it helps! worth a shot looking into it before you spend usless money on a new PSU if you don't really need one. I will however, recomend that you do at least buy a new CPU cooler, just to help with it. Be interested to know if the computer stutters when you're just in windows surfing the web? also or if its in every game you play? or just a few?

Honestly man, it might but it seems with the limited info we have about your problem it's just a guess. Have you tried re-seating your cpu? I see you said it maxed out at 74c, if that's the case you could be throttling every 10 minutes from overheating. http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/281154-29-5600k-safe-core-temps

You are probably using the stock fan for your processor which i find can sometimes not be enough, 74c seems to be the max safe temp for you cpu but that can always vary and i would want to be at least 10 degrees below that or more.

You haven't really given much info, post some screens of the temps you get, what specific games you are trying to play, what specific drivers you are using etc.

You really haven't given enough detailed information to narrow down the problem to definitely being the power supply. It could be any number of things, and your vague replies have only increased the number of possible causes for the problems your PC is experiencing.

I wouldn't jump into buying a new PSU yet until you have done some proper troubleshooting.