First, thank you to the folks here - my overheating issue has been resolved. It was due to the CPU itself overheating - I had applied MX-4 thermal paste, but what I thought was “just enough” turned out to be way too much. Upon pulling the heatsink off my cpu I found that the paste was thick and mushed around like frosting on a cupcake…probably due to the fact that the heatsink was a pain in the ass to get back on to the CPU. I reapplied a very small dot in the middle and have been working fine ever since (3+ weeks).
Now…on to the NEW problem.
Within the past week I have noticed that gameplay is causing severe sputtering, lag and freezing. As you can imagine, this has made game play unbearable, with online games such as WoW once again completely impossible to play. The sputtering & lag can last anywhere from 15 seconds to more than 3 minutes before resuming normal operation. The sputtering and lag does not occur with any sort of pattern (i.e. when a ton of action is happening on screen at once). It occurs randomly and can happen at any point during play. It even happens when using something as simple as Chrome, or when streaming on netflix or watching Youtube.
I have been told by 3 friends that are rather tech savvy and have regularly built their own computers that this is likely GPU or RAM issue. My GPU is absolute garbage, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see that it is failing.
When I did a RAM check in System Properties, I saw this:
8.0 GB Installed (3.9 GB usable)
That does not seem normal to me. Less than 4gb out of 8gb installed is available? Could one of the sticks be faulty? I was told by someone on CNET that the RAM is not compatible with my mobo. That seems strange because it was bundled together from NewEgg which guaranteed that the parts were compatible.
Specs from my original thread reposted below:
CPU: AMD FX-8320 Vishera 8-Core 3.5 GHz (4.0 GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 125W FD8320FRHKBOX Desktop Processor
MoBo::ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0 AM3+ AMD 970 + SB950 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS
PSU: Rosewill RD600 – Stallion Series 600-Watt Power Supply – ATX 12V V2.3, SLI & CrossFire-Ready
RAM: HyperX XMP Blu Red Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 Desktop Memory Model KHX16C9B1RK2/8X
GPU: SAPPHIRE DUAL-X Radeon R9 270 DirectX 11.2 100365L 2GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 Video Card With BOOST & OC
Tower: RAIDMAX Cobra Z ATX-502WBR Black / Red Steel / Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
Storage:
Seagate Desktop HDD ST1000DM003 1TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive
PNY XLR8 2.5" 120GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SSD9SC120GMDF-RB
OS: Windows 7 64 Home
Now…on to the NEW problem.
Within the past week I have noticed that gameplay is causing severe sputtering, lag and freezing. As you can imagine, this has made game play unbearable, with online games such as WoW once again completely impossible to play. The sputtering & lag can last anywhere from 15 seconds to more than 3 minutes before resuming normal operation. The sputtering and lag does not occur with any sort of pattern (i.e. when a ton of action is happening on screen at once). It occurs randomly and can happen at any point during play. It even happens when using something as simple as Chrome, or when streaming on netflix or watching Youtube.
I have been told by 3 friends that are rather tech savvy and have regularly built their own computers that this is likely GPU or RAM issue. My GPU is absolute garbage, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see that it is failing.
When I did a RAM check in System Properties, I saw this:
8.0 GB Installed (3.9 GB usable)
That does not seem normal to me. Less than 4gb out of 8gb installed is available? Could one of the sticks be faulty? I was told by someone on CNET that the RAM is not compatible with my mobo. That seems strange because it was bundled together from NewEgg which guaranteed that the parts were compatible.
Specs from my original thread reposted below:
CPU: AMD FX-8320 Vishera 8-Core 3.5 GHz (4.0 GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 125W FD8320FRHKBOX Desktop Processor
MoBo::ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0 AM3+ AMD 970 + SB950 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS
PSU: Rosewill RD600 – Stallion Series 600-Watt Power Supply – ATX 12V V2.3, SLI & CrossFire-Ready
RAM: HyperX XMP Blu Red Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 Desktop Memory Model KHX16C9B1RK2/8X
GPU: SAPPHIRE DUAL-X Radeon R9 270 DirectX 11.2 100365L 2GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 Video Card With BOOST & OC
Tower: RAIDMAX Cobra Z ATX-502WBR Black / Red Steel / Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
Storage:
Seagate Desktop HDD ST1000DM003 1TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive
PNY XLR8 2.5" 120GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SSD9SC120GMDF-RB
OS: Windows 7 64 Home
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