Discord is making my computer slow down when I try to share my screen or stream video
Discord is making my computer slow down when I try to share my screen or stream video
Every time I hit screen share on Discord, my PC freezes for one second, then goes back online for another, repeats this cycle until the menu closes. It's only a problem when streaming to Twitch via OBS; there is nothing wrong with that setup. I've reinstalled the program many times and deleted old registry files, but it didn't help much. I even did a clean Windows install because of my new SSD, yet the issue persists. Is anyone else seeing this? Could someone tell me what's causing it or how to fix it? Thanks! Also, if I stream a game directly while another one is open in Discord, the Twitch streaming part freezes up randomly for a second or two and makes games unplayable. My computer specs are: Ryzen 5600x, 16GB RAM at 3600MHz, and an RTX 3070.
I would start by uninstalling Discord just to see if that helps. But a power supply unit from five years ago is almost certainly beyond its intended lifespan, especially when it's being used for gaming, video editing, or mining. Since this PSU looks like it has about 550 watts of capacity and seems fine on the outside, things are worrying. All in all, that old PSU is probably near a point where the power demands from your computer are causing issues, leading to slowdowns or even complete failure. And adding a new graphics card might have made the old unit's problems worse. It depends on what apps you're running and how they use energy (like streaming video). If things freeze, other weird stuff happens, or it burns out suddenly, you risk losing your PC forever.
Open Task Manager or Resource Monitor to see how your computer works. Just use one of them at a time and keep the window open so you can watch what's happening. Let it sit for a bit until everything feels steady. Then start Discord and look again. Wait until things are stable before clicking "share screen". Check if performance changed. See which resource is being used, how much, and where that power goes. One second freezing should show up easily. Also tell me your PSU: what brand and model, how many watts it has, how old it is, and how good the condition is. Finally, tell me about your disk drives: make, model, how much space they have, and how full they are right now.
I cannot see any spikes on my Task manager or Resource monitor screen. Nothing seems to be using more than 30%. My PSU is an EVGA Supernova 550 G2, which I bought back in 2016 and should still work fine. My hard drives are: Boot/OS Drive uses a Sabrent 1TB Rocket Q4 drive that only has 35% full after installing Windows yesterday. SSD Storage shows my Crucial MX300 525 GB SSD at 0%. Hard Disk Storage is showing up as a 2TB Seagate Barracuda with 80% used, but I tried booting just the OS drive and it was fine before.
I also tested different RAM modules and only put in one stick to check if that caused issues. This problem has been happening for months since I got my RTX 3070 card, even though the card works fine otherwise. Here is what happened after I tried a different GPU:
* Watching YouTube alone = 20% GPU usage with no freezes.
* Watching YouTube and trying screen sharing = 5% GPU usage but constant freezing.
* After switching to Chrome for screen sharing, it freezes briefly at 15% usage, then works better at 40%, but every minute or so the CPU dips back to 15% and freezes the cursor while video and audio play normally.