Extensive unintended pauses occurred in Windows due to an imbalanced power configuration.
Extensive unintended pauses occurred in Windows due to an imbalanced power configuration.
I assembled this system roughly two months back: an ASUS Prime B760-PLUS D4 board, an Intel I5 13400 processor, Corsair Vengeance LPX Black RAM (16GB total, 8GB per stick), a Palit GeForce RTX 4060 with 8GB VRAM, a Seagate IronWolf 4TB HDD, a Kingston NVMe 1TB SSD, and an ASUS Tuf Gaming 750W 80+ Gold power supply. Windows 11 Home is installed on the HDD. Over the past two months I've experienced occasional strange "stuttering" issues—only four incidents so far. It's difficult to put into words. Picture a sudden drop in performance, around 2 frames per second, except for your mouse cursor which stays smooth. All other tasks lag, animations freeze, and every click feels delayed. The mouse remains responsive. A restart resolves the issue temporarily, but it can persist for days. During these episodes the task manager shows no unusual activity. CPU and GPU usage appear normal, temperatures are stable. Open Hardware Monitor reports low idle temps and moderate gaming temps (around 55°C). The GPU sits near 35°C at idle and just over 60°C during gameplay. I've reviewed Event Viewer but found nothing alarming. There were some WHEA 17 warnings on a PCIe port earlier, though they vanished after a BIOS update. I don't use sleep mode in Windows; each boot is a clean start, which is acceptable despite the delay. I ran LatencyMon during the stutter and it didn't highlight anything suspicious. Drivers are current, device manager shows no red flags, and I disabled unused sound cards (like Nvidia HD and RealTek). I updated the BIOS to version 1402, checked for SSD firmware updates via Kingston's tool, found none, and cleared RAM errors. Disabled XMP profile; RAM performance is now slower. Adjusted power settings in BIOS—switched to balanced and high performance modes—but the problem persisted. I changed CPU core parking using the ParkControl app, reset settings, and even tried disabling CPU core parking with a reset. System Interrupts stayed stable (0%–0.1%). I attempted a TPM disable, but the issue returned. I also edited BIOS settings for PCIe native power management and ASPM as recommended for some ASUS boards. Eventually the problem reappeared, so I re-enabled it. This update was made on November 26, 2023 by Mumintroll. Added further details.
Where exactly you’re looking is the Palit website, where you find NVIDIA drivers and the OC tool named Thundermaster.
This sounds like the system is waiting on I/O or DPC. try unplugging the spinning disk to see if that resolves it. Also check device manager for any . Sound drivers and networking drivers can cause this sort of issue. You can also try disabling those devices if you aren’t using them / can live without sound for a while. Stuttering like this is a pain to diagnose. It’s often some kind of driver or device conflict that you can’t figure out without unlugging/uninstalling/updating things until it gets fixed.
The spinning disc hosts Windows. The SSD is used for big games that load slowly on an HDD and don’t update often. You want to protect those valuable write cycles—nothing odd in Device Manager. I turned off Nvidia’s HD audio and Realtek Digital audio because I didn’t use them, but the issue persisted. Troubleshooting can be frustrating, especially since it’s happened only four times in two months. I use the PC daily for gaming to stay positive. Do you have any app suggestions to check I/O or DPC and latency? Also, I’m trying LatencyMon right now—please let it run for a while.
If the HDD were the issue, the computer would stop working entirely during that time. Even though I can still launch any programs and restart normally, I don’t believe it’s the HDD. There are no error alerts displayed, and all checks show normal results. I’ll solve this eventually—I’m relieved it doesn’t occur often. The PC has been functioning well since we last discussed it.