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Unexplainable newfound lag.

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Timtompc

PCHF Member
May 30, 2020
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First I'll list my specs, I built my pc myself a couple years back and everything's been smooth sailing up until just over a week ago.

I don't remember my motherboard model, I know it's gigabyte made.
AMD FX8350
Gtx960 (4gb)
8Gb DDR3 ram
1tb Seagate hard drive.. (more on this later)

So until last week I've had almost no issues in any game with lag, or choppy frame rate. I mainly play for honor, which isn't too graphically demanding, at high settings 60fps smoothly. I decided to update my graphics card driver as i hadn't updated it in a decent length of time, ever since I've been having frame rate issues. I tried to first roll back the driver. No luck, I used DDU to clean instal a few different drivers (one after the other with clean uninstall,) still no luck. I caved in to the idea my hard drive was dying as its a good age and bought a new one.. Did a clean install of Windows and only downloaded Firefox, msi afterburner, for honour (meaning both steam and U-play too) GeForce experience and installed the latest driver, which came out in the last couple days.. still I'm having unexplained lag. I can now run the smaller maps (duel arena size) 60fps at the low preset, I've tried most things i can think of and would appreciate any advice. Thank you :)
 
Hi,

When it comes to PC games you really should be using an SSD as a slow hard drive will be a major bottleneck with your system and will cause games to lag and stutter.

Its fine for storage but SSD's are so affordable now that there is no reason to still be using a slow hard drive nowadays.

I would recommend you buy this SSD, Samsung 860 EVO 500GB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E500B/AM).

Then after you upgrade to an SSD, see if your computer's performance improves when playing games.
 
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Hi,

When it comes to PC games you really should be using an SSD as a slow hard drive will be a major bottleneck with your system and will cause games to lag and stutter.

Its fine for storage but SSD's are so affordable now that there is no reason to still be using a slow hard drive nowadays.

I would recommend you buy this SSD, Samsung 860 EVO 500GB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E500B/AM).

Then after you upgrade to an SSD, see if your computer's performance improves when playing games.

No. That's ridiculous, I had no performance issues beforehand, on and old crappy hard drive. This is not the problem. If I had no lag before on a hard drive for 4 years and suddenly after the driver updates I'm getting lag. I'd rather you give me actual advice rather than seemingly trying to push an affiliate link. I want advice on my issue not "go spend unnecessary cash"
I see my gpu usage dip very low when I get lag spikes, this problem only started about a week ago after my driver update. The hard drive isn't the problem with my pc, that would just be an upgrade that I'm not wasting money on during these tough times
 
Look, I've been in the computer repair business for many years and upgrading to an SSD will improve your overall computers performance dramatically and will help to reduce stuttering and load times in games.

Now with that said, did the lag start out of nowhere? Did you make any changes to the system before the lag started? Does the lag happen in every game that you play? Are you overclocking any components? What version of Windows 10 are you using?

When the stuttering starts, have you opened up Task Manager to see how much disk usage, CPU and GPU usage a game is using?
 
No. That's ridiculous, I had no performance issues beforehand, on and old crappy hard drive. This is not the problem. If I had no lag before on a hard drive for 4 years and suddenly after the driver updates I'm getting lag. I'd rather you give me actual advice rather than seemingly trying to push an affiliate link. I want advice on my issue not "go spend unnecessary cash"
I see my gpu usage dip very low when I get lag spikes, this problem only started about a week ago after my driver update. The hard drive isn't the problem with my pc, that would just be an upgrade that I'm not wasting money on during these tough times



As for the affect of SSDs on gameplay, loading times, etc, please refer to this video (This is not the only one but it went fairly in depth about the matter):
If the problem has started recently it's entirely possible that the hard drive is just old, you claimed it to be crappy so it's entirely a possibility.

In the event it is not the hard drive at all, are you playing newer/different games? Are you playing online or offline, Are you using a new DRM or something of the sort?

I hope this helps get things sorted out.

Edit: off topic content removed.
 
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