Random Freezes with High CPU Usage

jc096887

Honorable
Jan 9, 2013
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10,510
I really don't know if my problem is with the CPU or the HDDs, but I thought I'd try to find an answer here first... Oh, and it isn't an overclocking problem really, but the forum wanted to place it under this category so I'm sorry about any confusion.

I set up my homebuilt PC with the following components:

Motherboard: Biostar A870U3 AM3 AMD 870 SATA 6.0 Gb/s
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition 3.4 GHz (No overclocking, factory settings only)
Hard Drives: 2 x Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS 1 TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0 Gb/s in RAID 0 array
Memory: 2 x 4 GB Patriot Gamer 2 Series DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Pro 64-bit

Now, for the problem. I experience lots of momentary "freezes" with this computer. 80% of the time it freezes when using web browsers (both Firefox and IE9), and the rest of the time it freezes when using Office programs or other locally installed programs. Oddly enough, it never freezes with games, either online or locally installed. These freezes occur for 10-45 seconds, and only lock up the window (browser or program window) and not the mouse or other programs. What I'm trying to say is that I can have Firefox locked up and "Not Responding" and still open up Word or My Documents, etc.

I have opened the resource monitor to try and figure out what the problem is. Originally, I thought it had to do with my RAID 0 array because it only started freezing after I switched from a single HDD to a RAID 0. The disk performance looked fine, so I looked at the CPU performance during a freeze. The "CPU - Total" chart showed continuous 100% usage during the freeze, while the "CPU 0 - 3" charts showed instantaneous spikes of about 60-80% each. The "Processes" window showed that Firefox was "Not Responding" and was using 0% of CPU. Just having a window open with Firefox normally has about 2% CPU usage.

My question to y'all is, does anyone know what could be the problem, and how do I go about fixing it?