Hard drive possible cause of stuttering?

[Soulfly]

Hey everyone!

So, for a bout a year and a half, I've had this weird problem where for example, if I would be scrolling down a page in Firefox, there was a stutter going on every few seconds. The same kind of deal would happen when watching videos...if there was a movement whatsoever in the video, there would be stuttering, but if the picture was still for example a guy just sitting in a chair talking, it would be fine. I remember doing a fresh install of Windows 7 when still having this problem, but wouldn't fix the problem.

It'd be the same when playing games, again, the same thing happening, the stuttering would happen if I was only moving, but not when I would be standing still. It wouldn't happen on all the games I played, but I noticed this kind of behaviour on some of them. For all this time, I didn't really mind that problem, since I wasn't much into games, but now I'm playing more of them, and it's becoming a problem.

I've done a few hardware replacements over the years, like the RAM, I thought maybe it was faulty RAM, but the problem still persisted. I also switched out the 8800gt video card with another one that I have when I was using both of them for SLI, but nothing changed. I also got a new PSU.

I've also just recently bought a new CPU, and again, nothing changed. So...this just leaves out the hard drive, or god forbid, even the motherboard, which I hope is not, but it's 6-7 years old...

I've ran Malwarebytes and even did some defragmentation, without returning positive results. I've also ran Scandisk and Western Digital LifeGuard Diagnostics...Both were saying that the hard drive was healthy. But, I've ran HD tune, and I'm not sure how to interpret the results, but the graph doesn't really look like other people's graphs. Here are two different tests that I've done (Screenshots below).

I'm really wondering if it's the hard drive, also, the boot time to windows is pretty long (about a minute and 30 seconds), but that could be just all the crap that's in there.

Thank you so much for your time, and please let me know if you need more info!

 

[Soulfly]

I just ran a Memtest through the night...9 passes and no errors, so I don't think that the Ram is the culprit here.

 

[Eblim]

The hardrive isn't used when watching YouTube videos, not much any way. Only used when loading cache. My first guess from your description of the problem, I would definitely say RAM is the issue. I don't understand why, 4GB of RAM should be more than capable of running a YouTube video.

When watching a YouTube video, and when it "stutters", can you open Task Manger and open the "Performance" tab. What is your "Free" and "Available" Physical Memory values?

 

[Brooklyn67]

copy important data to an external device

cleanup junk files, recycling bin, temp inet files, etc...

uninstall programs you dont really use but use up ram in your system tray, or at least dont let it auto start.

then defrag all of your harddrive partitions, fragmentation can really choke a system..

 

[Soulfly]

The hardrive isn't used when watching YouTube videos, not much any way. Only used when loading cache. My first guess from your description of the problem, I would definitely say RAM is the issue. I don't understand why, 4GB of RAM should be more than capable of running a YouTube video.

When watching a YouTube video, and when it "stutters", can you open Task Manger and open the "Performance" tab. What is your "Free" and "Available" Physical Memory values?

Available would be around 2100 and free would be around 400. I borrowed a hard drive from my brother and I'll do a clean install on that, to see if it's the hard drive or not. Thanks for sticking around!

 

[Eblim]

Then it shouldn't be RAM if you have that much available. Is your graphics driver up to date?

 

[charkzilla20]

Then it shouldn't be RAM if you have that much available. Is your graphics driver up to date?

That's what I'm thinking.
You are using SLI right? Could it possibly be microstuttering?

 

[Soulfly]

Then it shouldn't be RAM if you have that much available. Is your graphics driver up to date?

That's what I'm thinking.
You are using SLI right? Could it possibly be microstuttering?

I used to run SLI, but I stopped when I started having this problem I believe. I tried both cards separately, but still have the same problem. I did uninstall the driver before doing the switch, and reinstalled the latest driver to try the other card, but to no avail. Could both cards just be faulty or is it the fact that this motherboard has recognized geforce 8800gt's as evil? Haha. I borrowed a hard drive from my brother and will be doing a clean install on that and use it on my system to see if it's a hard drive problem, because at this point, I've pretty much narrowed it down to the hard drive and motherboard, and I pray to god that it's not the motherboard, since I've based my build on that. :huh:

Edit: Yes, it is like microstuttering. I'm happy that there's a term for it. I've tested the problem a couple of times on this game, that I used to be running smoothly without problem, since there hardware requirement is so minimal. The game is Soldat, which is a side-scrolling 2D game. When I would be moving to the right, or to the left, there would be this lag in between intervals, each interval would be like 50ms or so, and it's just constant.

Thank you so much for your time guys, I really appreciate it and I will be updating you guys tomorrow on how my brother's hard drive reacts with the clean install.

 

[bobafetthotmail]

nvidia drivers are hard to remove completely. Remove them with driver sweeper (now driver fusion) before installing the non SLI ones again.

 

[Soulfly]

Hey guys, sorry to get back to you so late, it was a hectic week.

So...I did a clean install on the hard drive that I borrowed from my brother, and same thing happens, still stutters, but I don't think it's the hard drive. It all narrows it down to the video card and motherboard....I again did a clean install of the video driver, switched my 8800gt with the other one, same thing again. Could a motherboard really cause this kind of stuttering?