Help! Terrible frame drops on my PC

My specs:

i7 3770 3.40Ghz

8GB RAM

HDD

GTX 1060 6 GB

My lowest frame drops were up to 1. Highest was 80 in assassins creed origins. I won’t call it a frame drop because it’s pretty smooth and also rendered beautifully in some cluttered areas at high settings. But would freeze and drops for up to 1fps occasionally. Same thing happens in vampyr. I lowered the settings and didn’t help

How hot is your PC getting? I only ask because you have an older i7. Maybe you've got a bunch of dust causing you to hit thermal limit.

I'm gonna guess heat as well. Open your PC up and take some compressed air to it, or vacuum out the fans and make sure it's not all clogged up. If you want to test, check out Open Monitor, which is a free tool that you can use to check all sorts of stuff about your PC while it's running, including temperature of your GPU and CPU.

I'm guessing RAM since some games stutter a bit when they want more than 8GBs. But since you didn't specify between laptop or desktop, it could be thermal throttling, in which case, open up something that can monitor your system usage and temperatures like NZXT's CAM or MSI's Afterburner to confirm one thing or another.

I'd also download Crystal Disk Info (it's free) and check your hard disks. A HD about to give up the ghost can cause these kinds of momentary freezes. Also have a look at the windows Event Viewer after a hiccup (right click on the start menu, select Event Viewer, then look at Windows Log -> System). There could be error messages related to the problem.

Download MSI Afterburner and set it up to monitor CPU usage, CPU temp, GPU usage, GPU temp and FPS. See which spikes with FPS drop.

This kinda stuff happens to me all the time too. I have 12gbs of ram and even on lower settings is the same thing. I think it has to do with the way windows sometimes throttles the graphics cards maybe? Ive seen this with a couple people with the lower end geforce cards mention this.

i am not sure whats going on with you PC but i can say that on my Ryzen 1500x @ 3.9Ghz 16GB DDR4 2666 GTX 1060GB runs Orgins very smooth at 1080p very high settings. So if you can provide some screen shots of of whats going on with your system while gaming, Also your graphics card will only throttle to very low clock if the temps are getting very high. Orgins is also very cpu intensive.

I'm going to mirror checking your hard drive. You'll want to check your drive S.M.A.R.T status. Also, while not as verbose, you can open a command prompt and enter "wmic diskdrive get status". If you get anything but OK, I would replace the drive. If it's been more than five years, I'd replace the drive. If you can't remember the last time you swapped it, I'd just go ahead and swap it. If you don't have an SSD I'd swap it.

It'll cost you a hundred bucks for a 2TB WD Black spinning platter based drive or a 512GB SSD, an evening to prep, and overnight to migrate data. Even if it doesn't resolve the issue, you at least have a clone of your data.

While you've got your PC open, blast it with short bursts from a can of air. Make sure the fins of the CPU and GPU heatsinks are free of dust.

If your game is flat out pausing during game play then un-pausing, that could be a hard drive issue. Hard drives don't affect FPS they with cause load errors game crashes long load times ect... also if you had a failing hard drive you would see problems with in windows first, explorer taking for ever, boot up taking for ever, files or folder that were once read able and no longer are, possible clicking noise from platter drives. It sounds like like you either have heat issues or a hardware issue. But without more diag info its hard to tell. Also if you had a hard drive failing the last thing you want to is run any kind of stress test on it, because that could really cause problems, so if you do run any kind of stress test make sure everything you can't live without is backed up somewhere.

Run the in game bench mark and use the save results feature and share those.