FPS lag/stutter help!

[tkt08]

I play games like BF3, CSS, ETC. I get fps stutter in some of the games I play. For example, in BF3 I get fps lag or stutter every like 2 mins or when a lot of things are happening. No matter if I play on all low or change the resolution smaller. I even get some fps stutter in CSS somehow, but it's not that bad as when I play more newer games. My fps will be smooth and fine then it suddenly gets laggy and stutters. I'm confused about what is causing this, but I thought maybe the memory or mobo. It's really annoying/confusing as I can't play most games with constant smooth fps. I upgraded my gfx card recently from a 5750 to a 6870. Help would be greatly appreciated.

My Specs
Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 955 (3.2 ghz)
Memory: 4 GB ddr2
Power: OCZ 600W StealthXStream Power Supply
GFX: XFX AMD Radeon HD 6870 900M 1 GB DDR5
System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
MOBO: Asus M4A785TD-M EVO Socket AM3/AMD
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Blue 640 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, 16 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II WD6400AAKS

 

[ricardois]

Can you post a video of that? because it is normal that on some places when there are much explosions or much graphics effects, frames goes down, that is why they say that you need to be running at 60fps to be smoth because on the worst case scenarios you may go under 30 what will present lag.

But try upgrading your graphics card drivers and see if this fix your issues;

 

[HEXiT]

normally when you lower rez and settings but still have the same stuttering it points to a bottleneck. but your cpu and gpu are a reasonable pairing so should not be the issue as the system is quite well ballanced...

your ram on the other hand
assuming you have a 4x1 gigs of ram, you can also try removing 2 of your 4 sticks to see if the motherboard is forcing single channel mode because you have all the ram slots filled... some boards will only allow dual channel mode if only 2 of the 4 slots are used.

actually scrap that i have just looked up your board and it only supports ddr3 so if you think its ddr2 i guess you made a mistake with either the board or the ram.

if the board is correct and you just had a typo with the ram then you have to make sure its running at the rite speed as some situations the ram can only run at 1066 due to certain limitations...
*AMD AM3 100 and 200 series CPU support up to DDR3 1066MHz
use cpu-z on the speed tab to figure this out.


your hdd is a fair to middle ground drive. not really fast but not particularly slow either. my guess is that it probably just needs defragging and ordering with a decent defragger like ultimate defrag... get the trial version and use its auto function to move all the large avi and other archive folders to the back of the disk and move the much needed o.s and game files to the outside of the disk where the drive is faster at retrieval... also move the pagefile to the outer tracks as this will help with overall system performance.
1 other tip. if you have lots of partitions or virtual partitions reduce them to a maximum of 2. a primary and a storage. doing so will increase drive performance by 10% for each partition you get rid of.
when done use a registry cleaner like ccleaner. run it a couple of times to get rid of all the bad reg data. hopefully this will clear everything up.

last but not least, go into your performance options for the o.s and set the virtual drive to no bigger than 6gig... (exactly 1.5 times the amount of ram you have) any more or less and you may have negative performance effects.

hope these tips help.

 

[AntiZig]

is your cpu oced? if it is, try undoing the overclock

 

[tkt08]

This is my first time posting a question here, I'm glad to see the responses so far!
ricardois: I think there's some videos of it on youtube. I updated my gfx driver yesterday to no avail
HEXiT: wow thanks for the response. I read your post about the memory, it appears that I mistakenly put the name of my original motherboard that I bought, but had to return due to it being broken before I got it. My friend bought me a different mobo as the one I originally wanted was out of stock. The one I currently am using is the M4a785-M. I have 2 sticks of 2gb memory (2gb ddr2 800 cl4 ballstix). Sorry about that. I downloaded CPU-Z as you said and checked the speed I'm not sure if NB Frequency is it, but it says 2000.0 MHz.
AntiZig: I haven't over clocked my cpu or my gfx .

 

[tkt08]

bump

 

[MXan]

Try the advice in this thread. Then check this thread; its for Skyrim specifically, but much of the advice works in a general sense as well. Let us know if either thread helps.