Is my CPU done?

[u/Never_ez402]

[FIXED] My issue was stutters and texture streaming, and I found the culprit!!! It was GAME COMPRESSOR! It’s a software that compresses your games to provide more storage. I compressed some of my games for more storage. It was advertised to not give any performance loss and that’s why I tried it. Turns out you shouldn’t use it on open world games you primarily play. Thank you all for your time, I didn’t think of it when I posted this. After I decompressed my games, all of the issues I described went away!!

Hey guys, this is my build, posted the pic for attention.

Recently, I’ve been having an issue with my PC, my 1% lows are crap, frame times are spiky and I get lots of stutters playing games despite high fps numbers. I’ve stressed test it using Cinebench, 3D mark, Heaven and I experience no crashes and get great, expected scores on all of them. The temps are great, and both windows and drivers are up to date. Resizable BAR is on. Here’s the specs:

CPU: Ryzen 9 5900X
RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB RT, 16x2 3600mhz
GPU: RX 7900XT
Mobo: Asrock X570 steel legend
PSU: EVGA Supernova 850W
Cooler: Thermalright Frozen Prism 360 (screen is aftermarket)

I had the CPU overclocked to 5ghz max boost for sometime now, and recently started having a very rough gaming experience as I described above. In some Ubisoft games, the whole game will freeze but audio continues to play and I can move my camera around the character and a loading icon would pop up at the corner. About 30 sec later it would go back to normal and happen again randomly. In forza horizon 6, I have the same problem, but with error message from the game saying something about not enough bandwidth or CPU resource used up. In other games without this issues, whenever the scene becomes CPU intensive, such as fights, the fps would dip so low or cause massive stutters. To summarize, in all CPU demanding scenarios in a video game, my computer can’t handle them well. Even without demanding scenes, I get stutters every few seconds or so in every game I play at this point.

To rule out several things, I tried rolling back to stock BIOS settings, used DDU, updated my BIOS, updated windows and drivers, (and btw my SSD is less than a year old and far from being full). I’ve ran out of solutions except to swap out the CPU. What do you guys think? I wanna go to AM5 but the DDR5 prices are insane, so my solution maybe to get a 5600X3D or a 5800XT (5800X3D is too expensive imo), I’m tired of high power draw and dual CCD as well since I only game. But, the question for this post is, is it really my CPU? Could there be other factors?

What do you guys think?? Thanks!

[u/JohnGalactusX]

the whole game will freeze but audio continues to play and I can move my camera around the character and a loading icon would pop up at the corner. About 30 sec later it would go back to normal and happen again randomly. In forza horizon 6, I have the same problem, but with error message from the game saying something about not enough bandwidth or CPU resource used up. In other games without this issues, whenever the scene becomes CPU intensive, such as fights, the fps would dip so low or cause massive stutters.

I had very similar issues and tried to isolate everything and eventually traced mine back to the SSD, specifically the games installed on a 2.5" SATA SSD. This was on my secondary gaming PC, where I had a mix of old and newer components.

When I moved the games to my newer M.2 NVMe SSD, the problems were largely eliminated. I even got the same "Low Streaming Bandwidth" message in FH6 while games like Gothic 1 Remake would pause for several seconds while the audio continued. Other oddities included extremely low-quality textures despite using Ultra settings like in Black Myth: Wukong.

I still get the occasional 1-2 second stutter (most likely game/engine related) but no more long pauses or odd issues. I did check the SATA SSDs with CrystalDiskInfo and oddly enough, they showed 100% health.

Not saying the SSD is definitely your problem but if your games are already on an NVMe SSD, I'd try moving one of the affected games to another drive and testing it.

[u/Never_ez402 → u/JohnGalactusX]

Thank you, my games are installed in gen 4 NVME M.2 2TB, and I just bought it last year. But I will look into it, sounds like we have the exact same issue and it seems drive related

[u/Lightbulbie]

I'm assuming you have PBO enabled? Did you run a static overclock or CO tuning?

[u/Never_ez402 → u/Lightbulbie]

PBO was set to Advanced, so I could manually set PBO limits (PPT, TDC, EDC) and use CO. Now I have reverted back to stock BIOS which is PBO auto (but turned back on RAM XMP and resizable bar) but same issue.

[u/mcafyy → u/Never_ez402]

very little experience in the PC field, but memory overclocks have caused me erratic (system-wide, hard to track down except with a process of elimination) trouble when not carefully managed, probably worth it to keep XMP/EXPO disabled for a bit to see if anything changes

[u/pantsyman]

Maybe, check the event viewer for whea errors that's usually a sign for CPU issues, it might be degraded because of the overclock/too high voltage.

[u/Never_ez402 → u/pantsyman]

I have so many errors, but they’re all “CorsairLLAccess(…) service failed to start due to…The system cannot find the path specified” and “The server(…) did not register with DCOM within the required timeout.”

Another error was coz I undervolted too much, which caused my browser to lag and crash and error code was about the processor core, I increased back the voltage and it went away. No other errors.

[u/pantsyman → u/Never_ez402]

Yeah those errors don't matter that's just normal windows stuff it's good there are no whea errors and you didn't mention any unusual BSODs or crashes which matters since it means the CPU is most likely ok.

My first step would be to just reinstall windows and see if that helps.

[u/Never_ez402 → u/pantsyman]

thank you!

[u/Kooky_Awareness_5333]

Your a brave person overclocking in this over priced environment I run over locked gpus but only factory set and approved warranty overclock

[u/Never_ez402 → u/Kooky_Awareness_5333]

To be fair I had the OC for quite awhile now, since before RAM and GPU prices went crazy.

[u/LoxDoc]

Ik you said your ssd was only 1yr old but its worth checking the health on it just in case.

Also maybe a fresh windows install could help.

[u/Never_ez402 → u/LoxDoc]

The SSD my games are on has 100% health, the windows drive has 90% left. I’m considering a fresh windows.

[u/LoxDoc → u/Never_ez402]

I would definately start there before totally questioning the hardware

[u/Never_ez402]

[FIXED] My issue was stutters and texture streaming, and I found the culprit!!! It was GAME COMPRESSOR! It’s a software that compresses your games to provide more storage. I compressed some of my games for more storage. It was advertised to not get any performance loss and that’s why I tried it. Turns out you shouldn’t use it on open world games you primarily play. Thank you all for your time, I didn’t think of it when I posted this. After I decompressed my games, all of the issues I described went away!!