Truth be told, I actually don't know if this is a hard drive issue or something more nefarious, but I've been having performance issues that I can only describe as stuttering or micro freezing for at least a year or so that I've mostly learned to live with. Over recent months I've done a significant amount of investigation and experimentation with really no varying results.
Here are my specs. This machine is oldish so some type of hardware failure wouldn't really surprise me:
- EVGA nForce 680i Mobo
- Core 2 Duo e6850 3.0ghz *edited: forgot to add this*
- MSI GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II/OC
- Patriot Viper 4GB DDR2 800 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220293
- Seasonic M12II 620W PSU (This was recently replaced due to not being able to turn on my computer (easily), which fixed that problem. Stuttering existed before and after.)
- Current Windows HD: Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337
- Games HD: Western Digital Black 2TB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136792
Sorry for a longish story but being somewhat savvy with computers, I've taken a lot of steps to try and troubleshoot this myself. Thanks in advance anyone who gives up their valuable free time to make suggestions being that it's stupid complicated.
I'll preface by saying the case is well ventilated and I have a custom CPU cooler, with fans seated next to the hard drives so it's extremely unlikely there's an overheating issue. I did used to overclock (without issue) but during this process, I have since defaulted all the settings to factory. Also when I started out, my computer had three hard drives. One for Windows, one for games, one for miscellaneous storage. I eventually put Windows to another drive which I explain later.
The Mobo also has one blown capacitor, not really sure how to test if this is a factor. Don't have any lock up issues or anything like that though.
So, here's the gist of the symptoms. The stuttering issue seems to be prevalent within the OS as well as in games, severity differing depending on the game. In Skyrim, there's a lot of stutter particularly when turning. In Arkham Asylum GOTY and Arkham Origins, just moving about the world will typically stutter, usually worse in outdoor environments, opening things like doors and loading the next room usually gives it a good momentary freeze. Deus Ex Human Revolution Director's Cut seems to be the absolute worst, stutters all over the place. This is originally why I started to suspect some kind of asset streaming bottleneck, but I remember when the original non-director's cut of Deus Ex came out, and played through it with no problems or hitching of any kind.
Running things like Firefox, the app will sometimes freeze for a second and resume. The mouse doesn't lock in this situation, just the OS. Searching for files in Windows 8 also causes a big lag (Strangely this doesn't happen in Windows 7).
I ended up disconnecting the old Windows drive, making room on the miscellaneous storage drive and reinstalled Windows. This puts me down to two connected hard drives. I can't really tell that it helped any, but it feels like it may have marginally, not enough to really help though.
So at this point I found my Windows 7 disc and decided to remove 8.1 and put 7 back on. The problem seems to be less exacerbated on this OS. I've reinstalled W8 many times so I know how they both feel on a clean install. The hitching is less severe and Arkham Origins feels fairly playable now, but in some games like Human Revolution or Skyrim, still extremely bad.
I've tried other things like re-seating the memory, re-seating the heatsinks on both the CPU and GPU, moving the sata ports around, updating and tweaking the bios, updating drivers, moving around the swap file, you name it. Anything next to physically changing out parts, but I don't have parts convenient that I can swap out with so I'm trying to learn as much as I can about the problem and where to maybe look before I purchase anything.
In conclusion, my best guess is that the problem is in relation to the hard drives, motherboard, cpu or RAM, or any combination of.
I ran a benchmark on both hard drives, so someone may have to analyze for me if this looks any bit normal. I also ran memtest86 for a good long time but that turned up nothing.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]
Sequential Read : 105.194 MB/s
Sequential Write : 103.389 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 30.977 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 48.560 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.346 MB/s [ 84.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 0.725 MB/s [ 177.1 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.663 MB/s [ 161.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.736 MB/s [ 179.8 IOPS]
Test : 1000 MB [C: 69.5% (971.2/1397.3 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2014/01/27 6:10:58
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]
Sequential Read : 102.220 MB/s
Sequential Write : 87.381 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 36.816 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 54.539 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.466 MB/s [ 113.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.156 MB/s [ 282.2 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.814 MB/s [ 198.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.057 MB/s [ 258.0 IOPS]
Test : 1000 MB [D: 87.4% (1628.6/1862.9 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2014/01/27 6:18:28
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
Here are my specs. This machine is oldish so some type of hardware failure wouldn't really surprise me:
- EVGA nForce 680i Mobo
- Core 2 Duo e6850 3.0ghz *edited: forgot to add this*
- MSI GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II/OC
- Patriot Viper 4GB DDR2 800 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220293
- Seasonic M12II 620W PSU (This was recently replaced due to not being able to turn on my computer (easily), which fixed that problem. Stuttering existed before and after.)
- Current Windows HD: Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337
- Games HD: Western Digital Black 2TB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136792
Sorry for a longish story but being somewhat savvy with computers, I've taken a lot of steps to try and troubleshoot this myself. Thanks in advance anyone who gives up their valuable free time to make suggestions being that it's stupid complicated.
I'll preface by saying the case is well ventilated and I have a custom CPU cooler, with fans seated next to the hard drives so it's extremely unlikely there's an overheating issue. I did used to overclock (without issue) but during this process, I have since defaulted all the settings to factory. Also when I started out, my computer had three hard drives. One for Windows, one for games, one for miscellaneous storage. I eventually put Windows to another drive which I explain later.
The Mobo also has one blown capacitor, not really sure how to test if this is a factor. Don't have any lock up issues or anything like that though.
So, here's the gist of the symptoms. The stuttering issue seems to be prevalent within the OS as well as in games, severity differing depending on the game. In Skyrim, there's a lot of stutter particularly when turning. In Arkham Asylum GOTY and Arkham Origins, just moving about the world will typically stutter, usually worse in outdoor environments, opening things like doors and loading the next room usually gives it a good momentary freeze. Deus Ex Human Revolution Director's Cut seems to be the absolute worst, stutters all over the place. This is originally why I started to suspect some kind of asset streaming bottleneck, but I remember when the original non-director's cut of Deus Ex came out, and played through it with no problems or hitching of any kind.
Running things like Firefox, the app will sometimes freeze for a second and resume. The mouse doesn't lock in this situation, just the OS. Searching for files in Windows 8 also causes a big lag (Strangely this doesn't happen in Windows 7).
I ended up disconnecting the old Windows drive, making room on the miscellaneous storage drive and reinstalled Windows. This puts me down to two connected hard drives. I can't really tell that it helped any, but it feels like it may have marginally, not enough to really help though.
So at this point I found my Windows 7 disc and decided to remove 8.1 and put 7 back on. The problem seems to be less exacerbated on this OS. I've reinstalled W8 many times so I know how they both feel on a clean install. The hitching is less severe and Arkham Origins feels fairly playable now, but in some games like Human Revolution or Skyrim, still extremely bad.
I've tried other things like re-seating the memory, re-seating the heatsinks on both the CPU and GPU, moving the sata ports around, updating and tweaking the bios, updating drivers, moving around the swap file, you name it. Anything next to physically changing out parts, but I don't have parts convenient that I can swap out with so I'm trying to learn as much as I can about the problem and where to maybe look before I purchase anything.
In conclusion, my best guess is that the problem is in relation to the hard drives, motherboard, cpu or RAM, or any combination of.
I ran a benchmark on both hard drives, so someone may have to analyze for me if this looks any bit normal. I also ran memtest86 for a good long time but that turned up nothing.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]
Sequential Read : 105.194 MB/s
Sequential Write : 103.389 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 30.977 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 48.560 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.346 MB/s [ 84.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 0.725 MB/s [ 177.1 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.663 MB/s [ 161.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.736 MB/s [ 179.8 IOPS]
Test : 1000 MB [C: 69.5% (971.2/1397.3 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2014/01/27 6:10:58
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]
Sequential Read : 102.220 MB/s
Sequential Write : 87.381 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 36.816 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 54.539 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.466 MB/s [ 113.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.156 MB/s [ 282.2 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.814 MB/s [ 198.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.057 MB/s [ 258.0 IOPS]
Test : 1000 MB [D: 87.4% (1628.6/1862.9 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2014/01/27 6:18:28
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
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