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Need help diagnosing stuttering every 15-30 minutes.

Last response: in Systems
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Hey all, I hope someone here can help with this, because I'm at my wits end. Some of this stuff will be pasted from a thread I have going on Overclockers.co.uk.

The basics: The system will freeze for approximately 2 seconds, 3 times in quick succession, then everything will return to normal. It only lasts maybe 10 seconds in total, and it never causes a crash. But it always locks 3 times in a row quickly. It will happen maybe once every 15-30 minutes and will always happen while playing games or watching movies in VLC or other players. Issue has persisted through PSU upgrade.

Steps I've tried so far:

Monitoring the temperature and system load during the locks (no change or spikes, temperatures are reasonable)
Full clean Windows reinstall (multiple times)
BIOS upgrade/downgrade with and without overclock settings
Swapped GFX card to difference PCI-E ports
Hard drives set to never shut down in Windows settings
Disabling 2nd monitor
Changing SATA ports of all attached drives & disabling GSATA in BIOS (recommended in a similar issue posted elsewhere)
Enabled extreme memory profile in BIOS (as above)
Memtest & GPU memory test clean
Clean startup via msconfig.exe
Moving all devices out of USB3 ports
Downgrading GFX driver, installing with/without CCC
Detatching everything except keyboard, mouse and main HD.
Full surface scan of HD.

I tested with a spare GFX card (GTX550Ti) and the card was extremely unstable with crashing drivers and artifacts on 3D or video (even after a clean Windows install), but the card itself may have been faulty.


System spec:

Intel Core i7 920 D0 Stepping (SLBEJ) 2.66GHz
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache
Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express
Socket 1366 - GA-X58A-UD3R (rev. 1.0)
Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Again, just 3 quick hiccups on GFX and sound, then back to normal, every time, no lockups or blue screens. If you have any suggestions at all, please post them.

Thank you!

More about : diagnosing stuttering minutes

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quilciri said:
There were some freezing issues with the 5870 I remember from a couple years ago. Try this article.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ATI-Radeon-Gray-Screen...


Much appreciated. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anything helpful there. I have tried over and underclocking, and there are no artifacts or crashes when this happens.

I'm not even 100% sure if it's anything to do with the GFX card. I wish I could say for sure what component is causing it so I can replace it.
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Bummer.

Look at hard disk light when stutter hits. On? Off? Flickering differently than before or after.

Launch 'resource monitor'. Run in background. Check (1) Disk service time, (2) spike in network traffic when the stutter happens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Monitor

Full clean Windows reinstall kind of rules out virus, but I would still check with a stand-alone download of Norten or MS SEcurity essentials.

Some network and disk error recovery procedures look like this stutter. Check smart data on the disk (download diag program from disk manufacturer to get best SMART data). Do you have another disk you can try (trial of Acronis true image will clone your current drive) ? Can you drop the network by disablign adapter in Device Manager and see if it still stutters ?

Good luck.

Thanks a lot for your reply. I just tried disabling the network card and ruled that out. However I did find something interesting on the Disk graph for resource monitor which I never noticed before. On the most recent stutter there were 3 spikes on the "Highest Active Time" meter (blue line). I/O didn't budge.

Any ideas?

The problem is tested and confirmed to be the hard drive. Still don't know what's causing it exactly, the surface scan, SMART and all other tests came up clean. There are other reports of similar problems with this drive model.

I disabled it last night and installed Windows on an old 5400 120gb SATA drive, and despite the fact it's slower for general use, zero stutters. Touch wood, the problem is solved.

I gone online and treated myself to a shiny SSD, a replacement 1tb storage drive, and a couple of stutter free hours of Diablo 3. The old drive doesn't seem to have any data corruption issues so I'll pick up a USB caddy and use it for non-essentials.

Thanks for the help and suggestions, and great catch on the hard drive symptoms!
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