5 Second Pauses

[wbatchelder]

First, here are my Comp's Specs:

AMD 64 Dual Core 6400+
ASUS MB
4GB Cosair Dominator Dual Channel RAM
500 GR SATA HD
Nvidia 9800GTX
850W Power Supply


I'm getting game freezes/pauses in high graphics games. Specifically I've gotten them in Battlefield 2142 and WoW. I'll be running fine at 10% CPU usage and then suddenly there will be a 5 second pause of the whole system. My CPU will spike to 100% (no matter how much I'm running) by distributing the rest of the CPU to the stuff running. Then after 5 seconds it frees up. It'll repeat this every minute or so.

I've had this system for about 4 months and it just started doing this about 2 weeks ago.

HELP!

 

[Maziar]

Have u Downloaded the latest VGA driver ?

 

[Outlander_04]

a back ground service ?

possibly your antivirus?
try dissabling it and see what happens

 

[jerreece]

Normally I'd think you had a bottleneck with swapping info between the harddrive and memory, or hard drive and video memory. However, if your CPU is hitting 100% during these pauses, there's likely something else going on. In any case, it's always good to make sure you have the absolute latest video drivers, DirectX, etc.

You might also check your background processes and see if you can identify what is tying up your CPU usage. In other words, is WoW running 100% CPU time, or is WoW at 0% and say, "Norton Antivirus" or some other program is suddenly using the CPU during those spikes.

Battlefield 2142 & WoW really should not stress your system that badly. You should be running both of those pretty smoothly.

On the other hand, since both are internet based for gameplay, have you checked your internet latency? Are you perhaps getting large spikes in your ping time that correspond to those freezes? I used to have that problem with WoW when I used to play that (though not necessarily 100% CPU usage).

 

[montyuk]

i would have task manager open and run the games minimised for a bit, watch every process and see if a spike happens, if it does, note the process that caused it and report back.

 

[wbatchelder]

I'll answer these questions one at a time. Know the end result is that it's not any of what you listed here.

- Yes I've uninstalled and reinstalled every driver there is. I've even swapped out the HD, Memory, Video Card, Sound Card and Nic Card to see if it was any of those things. Same result.

- If it were a background process it would likely be constant and not spiky. This is up and down every 30seconds or so.

- I've turned off the Anti-Virus to see if it was the problem. Same result. It's also not another anti-virus related product, as it's off when I was testing.

- There's nothing wrong with the Nic card or the internet latency. The game runs fine until there's a spike. Also, I have another computer on the same router with no problems. And no, it's not the Nic card. I've swapped it out with the same results. There's no spike in PING. When pingging something common, like cnn.com it's consistant 12ms even through the 100% CPU spike every 30 seconds.

- I've had task manager open to watch it. Whatever process is open it gives 100% CPU usage to it. Doesn't matter which game I'm running. Doesn't matter it I have IE open, or Vent, or Notepad. If it's open it gets a portion of the 100%.

- Also, before someone tries to blame heat. My comp. stays at a level 47C.