Diagnose my computer BG

[Gredival]

I've been experiencing some stuttering/lag issues with my rig recently, even on games that shouldn't push my hardware that hard.

The problem is intermittent; every 1-2 hours I'll get a lag spurt where the window in focus will freeze. This is usually a game, mainly either StarCraft II or Dota 2. In really severe cases, the entire computer will lock up for 30~ seconds, but in milder cases the rest of the computer will still be functional with only the one window stuck (the window gets the whitish frozen tint and sometimes I'll get the message it has stopped responding asking if I wish to close it). For example, I can see on my other monitor that Youtube may still playing video during mild lock-ups, but during heavy ones the video may freeze with only the audio continuing.

These results occur regardless of hard or soft lock-ups. I don't know what disconnect/nonfunctional signal the computer sends out when this happens, I usually get kicked out of the Dota 2 server and have to reconnect when the lag is over. In StarCraft II while my screen is locked up, I'll pop up on the disconnect timer for everyone else. When the lockout is over, the game SC2 will frame skip a bit before returning to normal. Notable is that the issue ONLY occurs when playing Heart of the Swarm -- not ever when playing Wings of Liberty.

In some cases I've been able to replicate the issue without having a game up -- usually with Chrome, Firefox, or Skype locking up while the rest of the computer is functional. Perhaps related is sometimes Chrome will seem to sputter when loading with multiple tabs trying to load something and there seemingly being no internet connectivity then in a few seconds later everything will load all at once.

I updated the BIOS and tinkered with my settings, and updated my drivers. The result of that has been a great reduction in frequency of total lockups. But I am still getting the soft lockups. When I've had resource monitor up during lockups I've seen one core's load increase near max until it ends (more often than not, Core 3)

I've tinkered with OC'ing, and that actually reduced the lockups but seemed to introduced general instability and lag.

I figure this is either a hardware issue, or a requires a clean format issue. If it's the former I pray it's just a GPU or RAM swap since that would be easy. If it's the latter, I should be getting a new SSD somewhat soonish. If it's anything else, Tanaka help me.

Specs:

OS: Win7 Professional 64bit
CPU: Intel i7 920 (Bloomfield)
GPU: XFX Radeon HD 4890
RAM: Corsair 6gb (3 sticks of 2GB) DDR3 1333 (9-9-9-24)
HDD: WD Raptor 300GB
PSU: 750W
Motherboard: Asus P6T

[Waraji]

Never had such frequency in lock-ups with my 920/P6T V2. At first it sounded like bad drivers, then you updated your drivers. There could def be some drivers that you don't realize need to be running that are corrupted or need to be updated for w/e reason.

Make sure you keep up a healthy Defrag regimen for your HDD's. You wouldn't get crazy lockups like this, specific windows not working but others do, if it were strictly hardware. Might it be Dx drivers?

Good Luck

[SephYuyX]

Try these:

Default BIOS everything.
Reinstall GPU drivers.
Uninstall all GPU drivers (using default 800x600 crap display).
Switch out monitors.
Switch out GPU and ensure the correct drivers.
Reformat. (do this first if it's the easiest)

I'm betting if you uninstall and use no drivers it will work fine, meaning your GPU is prob shot.

[Waraji]

That's assuming you have a spare GPU (I finally have one after 7 years [yay]). Can't stress how useful it is to have a slew of spare hardware.

[Gredival]

My graphics card actually has a lifetime warranty via XFX, so if I can somehow confirm it's the GPU that would be great. But I don't have another card compatible with this computer that I could test with. If I bought a testing card, I might as well make a permanent swap out I feel.

So I think I confirmed that when Chrome is "working" but pages aren't loading, it's a small lockup. I tried to open Firefox during once of these instances to test whether Firefox would load while Chrome was stuck, and instead it caused the entire system to seize up for 10~ secs. When it stopped the Chrome tabs all loaded with the three windows of Firefox loading.

[orinthia]

What's your hdd and ram usage like? I know windows can seize up if there's too much hdd accesses or swap file usage. There could also be something in the background eating up your processes. Multicore helps mitigate that though, but you never know without looking. Keep open the task manager, and maybe the resource monitor to see overall activity (sort by either highest ram usage or cpu usage; you may need to put in the right columns).

It can also be a sign of a hdd beginning to fail (it's having to find good sectors to replace failing ones). You can check the SMART readout of the hdd, but it's not always very reliable.

add: now that I think about it, your hardware is actually pretty old (relatively). General hardware fatigue could also be hurting it (PSU not regulating the power as effectively as it used to, mobo/ram near end of life, etc).

[Gredival]

HDD failure was the first thing I thought of, but CHKDSK and SMART readouts both passed muster. I'm planning on migrating to a new SSD anyway as I'm waiting on a shipment from Kingston that was supposed to come last month. But I'm preparing for the worst and if it's not a software issue I want to be ready when I swap hard drives to plop in whatever new I have to, be it a network card, graphics card, RAM, etc. I was hoping though someone would have a good clue what it is I need to replace so I don't need to go through building essentially a new rig to find the culprit.

I've checked the task manager to see if there was anything in the background eating up memory but not really. Killing a few extraneous processes that total maybe 10k combined memory really has no effect. Even killing Skype (100k~) and Firefox or Chrome (200~400k) before starting a gaming session doesn't prevent the seizing. I'll try force a lock-up and get some base numbers.

[jmc]

HDD failure was the first thing I thought of, but CHKDSK and SMART readouts both passed muster. I'm planning on migrating to a new SSD anyway as I'm waiting on a shipment from Kingston that was supposed to come last month. But I'm preparing for the worst and if it's not a software issue I want to be ready when I swap hard drives to plop in whatever new I have to, be it a network card, graphics card, RAM, etc. I was hoping though someone would have a good clue what it is I need to replace so I don't need to go through building essentially a new rig to find the culprit.

I've checked the task manager to see if there was anything in the background eating up memory but not really. Killing a few extraneous processes that total maybe 10k combined memory really has no effect. Even killing Skype (100k~) and Firefox or Chrome (200~400k) before starting a gaming session doesn't prevent the seizing. I'll try force a lock-up and get some base numbers.

Was coming in here to post I had a pretty identical problem, and the faulty hardware was my HDD.

However after reading this part, I have no clue lol

[Gredival]

Try these:

Default BIOS everything.
Reinstall GPU drivers.
Uninstall all GPU drivers (using default 800x600 crap display).
Switch out monitors.
Switch out GPU and ensure the correct drivers.
Reformat. (do this first if it's the easiest)

I'm betting if you uninstall and use no drivers it will work fine, meaning your GPU is prob shot.

I uninstalled all GPU software and even switched the PCI-E port the card was in. I loaded up in 800x600 I couldn't get it to lock up at this state, but I also couldn't really run anything. So I let Windows install the basic drivers so I could test to see what happened in gameplay without ATI drivers. I still got a lock-up but instead of the screen going white, I got a different looking Windows Error dialogue box and the game window went black. At the end of the freeze I was automatically dropped from SC2, meaning it was a very severe freeze relative to others.

Still sound like it's a GPU problem?

[Kohan]

Do you have anything in your CD/DVD-ROM? Are there USB thumb drives or any other external USB/SATA/et cetera storage devices connected to your machine? Have you tried deactivating your anti-virus, firewall, and anti-malware software and seeing if the issue still happens then?

[Gredival]

Disconnected everything non essential, except the slave internal HDD, leaving only mouse and keyboard. Shut down every process besides resource monitor. Was able to crash in SC2. On resource monitor the crash caused a spike in Core 3's load until lockup ended and the queue times on my HDD skyrocketed. Memory was not affected.

[xopher]

Get the SSD.

[Gredival]

Yeah I was supposed to have this complimentary HyperX SSD delivered last month but it never arrived... Been trying to follow up with my contacts. I'm hoping that's all it is really, but I feel like something would show up on SMART and CHKDSK if that's all it was.

EDIT: I've gotten Firefox to seize up with Flash Plugin crashes while I was in resource monitor watching. When I do so, one CPU core will spike up and Flash processes will multiply like rabbits and cycle through terminations, and on the Disk tab the queue length graph basically maxes out.

[Kalmado]

I have a complete pc for sale too if you're interested

Seriously though, I understand you stated you removed the drivers and reinstalled, but did you also remove from the registry as well? If not, maybe this would help. I recently had to do the same and this thread was awesome to learn from.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=379461

[Gredival]

So I just tried to push the GPU with the drivers completely uninstalled including registry clean, but I couldn't get into any real games or benchmark programs without drivers installed.

I was able to get 20+ instances of Youtube and Twitch.tv streams going simultaneously without a lock-up, although it did start to lack once I got into the double digits. I tried to boot up the FFXI benchmark during this and that induced a spaz. I could hear the Youtube and Twitch streams keep going in the background, but whenever I alt-tabbed I couldn't actually bring anything else into focus.

Note that the FFXI Benchmark didn't actually load, it was just an error message. But I had to wait for some of the Youtubes to end before killing Firefox and Chrome through right clicking the taskbar, then I could bring the error dialogue into focus. I couldn't close it by clicking ok, so closed the FFXI benchmark via right click on the task bar. At this point I could finally got resource monitor to load on screen. I don't know if they were still current at this point but the memory graphs were flat, the disk graphs were spiky but not fully maxed out, and the core loads were consistently high.

I'm about to clean install drivers now and run some GPU specific benchmarks and boot SC2 to see what happens.

EDIT: Hm... no freezes since the clean install, but I installed the bare minimum. Going to try see if installing full reintroduces lock-ups.

EDIT 2: Nvm got it to lock up in SC2 with bare driver. Going to try a stress test.

EDIT: No crash during FurMark. It had shitty FPS (9~10), but temps stayed around 80 C on 1920x1080 15 min burn. But I did get Firefox to lock-up shortly afterwards with regular browsing...