Weird Stuttering In Games Out of Nowhere

[Iamthewalrus]

Hey everyone. I just got a Dell Inspiron 7559 laptop about three days ago. It is used, but I used some programs and whatnot and got it running really squeaky clean and smooth. Now after turning it off and unplugging the power cord overnight, I come back to find that all my games that it normally ran consistently at 60 FPS now have these random drops in FPS about every 5 seconds. It's extremely irritating, and I've tried a bunch of things trying to fix it. I'm not sure what to do. The most recent things I've installed are Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim Special Edition, and a bunch of mods for each. I don't see how that would be related, but maybe I should try uninstalling all the mods and whatnot? I've tried both of those and Mass Effect 2, and all of them have this awful stuttering. I did have IOBit Advanced System Care which really did help clean up the PC and get it running well, but I uninstalled it because it conflicted with Malwarebytes and AVG, my other two virus programs. Could that have anything to do with it? I don't think it's heat, but I have no idea how to test this.

These are my specs:
8 GB RAM
Windows 10 Home 64-Bit Operating System
Intel Core i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60 GHz Processor
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M Graphics Card
930 GB Hard Drive.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[xnecron101x]

If it wouldn't be too much of an inconvenience, I would always suggest reinstalling Windows from scratch after buying a used computer. I'm not even sure if that would help your specific issue, but it's always a possibility.

More to the point: three things come to mind immediately.
-First is power options (i.e. making sure Intel turbo boost is getting activated, making sure your dedicated GPU is actually being used, etc.)
-Second possibility is thermal throttling. Does the computer get hot to the touch? you can use software like HWmonitor to watch temperatures under load.
-Third is just making sure you have the most recent drivers installed for your graphics card

 

[Iamthewalrus]

If it wouldn't be too much of an inconvenience, I would always suggest reinstalling Windows from scratch after buying a used computer. I'm not even sure if that would help your specific issue, but it's always a possibility.

More to the point: three things come to mind immediately.
-First is power options (i.e. making sure Intel turbo boost is getting activated, making sure your dedicated GPU is actually being used, etc.)
-Second possibility is thermal throttling. Does the computer get hot to the touch? you can use software like HWmonitor to watch temperatures under load.
-Third is just making sure you have the most recent drivers installed for your graphics card

I know that I have the latest GPU drivers. I tried testing my CPU temperature, and it didn't seem too bad at around 60 degrees, although I did notice that whenever it stuttered in game the CPU load increased to about 15% usually, then decreased gradually to about 5-7%. How would I check the first bullet you said? It's somewhat hot on and around the vents, and fans, and the keyboard is warm.

I also considered reinstalling Windows, but it was working at the time so I didn't want to risk anything... I don't have a disk or key on hand either so I couldn't. A friend said I could wipe it without it and it'd be fine... What I'm concerned about is the drivers, as I have no disks or anything to restore that with. Perhaps is there any way I could do that? It could fix it...

 

[mcnumpty23]

8gb of ram may be too low for heavily modded games

 

[Iamthewalrus]

8gb of ram may be too low for heavily modded games

It does this on all games. Besides, it set both of them to ultra settings by default.

 

[mcnumpty23]

8gb of ram may be too low for heavily modded games

It does this on all games. Besides, it set both of them to ultra settings by default.

as already mentioned a clean re-install of windows would have been a good idea when you got it

for one it runs better than just trying to clean everything up

secondly its second hand and even though you have an anti virus and malwarebytes personally i would want to wipe anything left by the previous owner

 

[xnecron101x]

I know that I have the latest GPU drivers. I tried testing my CPU temperature, and it didn't seem too bad at around 60 degrees, although I did notice that whenever it stuttered in game the CPU load increased to about 15% usually, then decreased gradually to about 5-7%. How would I check the first bullet you said? It's somewhat hot on and around the vents, and fans, and the keyboard is warm.

I also considered reinstalling Windows, but it was working at the time so I didn't want to risk anything... I don't have a disk or key on hand either so I couldn't. A friend said I could wipe it without it and it'd be fine... What I'm concerned about is the drivers, as I have no disks or anything to restore that with. Perhaps is there any way I could do that? It could fix it...

For checking on power options, just click on the battery icon in the bottom right and make sure that you're on "High Performance" mode when you're playing games. You should also check the Nvidia settings (Nvidia Control Panel I believe) for switchable graphics modes.

As for checking Intel Turboboost, just open the Task Manager or another program that monitors CPU speed and see if it goes faster than 2.6 GHz under load. If it does, then congrats, Turbo boost is on. If it's not, I'm not actually sure there's much you can do about it other than check your BIOS/UEFI for an option to enable it.

Hope any of this helps

Edit: also, drivers can be gotten quite easily from the manufacturers website if you decided to reinstall Windows.

 

[Iamthewalrus]

8gb of ram may be too low for heavily modded games

It does this on all games. Besides, it set both of them to ultra settings by default.

as already mentioned a clean re-install of windows would have been a good idea when you got it

for one it runs better than just trying to clean everything up

secondly its second hand and even though you have an anti virus and malwarebytes personally i would want to wipe anything left by the previous owner

I thought the same, but like I said I don't have an install disk nor do I have the proper disks to install all the drivers, so unless the computer can reinstall Windows and all the proper drivers on it's own, I can't do that.

 

[mcnumpty23]

8gb of ram may be too low for heavily modded games

It does this on all games. Besides, it set both of them to ultra settings by default.

as already mentioned a clean re-install of windows would have been a good idea when you got it

for one it runs better than just trying to clean everything up

secondly its second hand and even though you have an anti virus and malwarebytes personally i would want to wipe anything left by the previous owner

I thought the same, but like I said I don't have an install disk nor do I have the proper disks to install all the drivers, so unless the computer can reinstall Windows and all the proper drivers on it's own, I can't do that.

yes it should be able to

it should have a hidden factory recovery partition to do exactly that

 

[Iamthewalrus]

8gb of ram may be too low for heavily modded games

It does this on all games. Besides, it set both of them to ultra settings by default.

as already mentioned a clean re-install of windows would have been a good idea when you got it

for one it runs better than just trying to clean everything up

secondly its second hand and even though you have an anti virus and malwarebytes personally i would want to wipe anything left by the previous owner

I thought the same, but like I said I don't have an install disk nor do I have the proper disks to install all the drivers, so unless the computer can reinstall Windows and all the proper drivers on it's own, I can't do that.

yes it should be able to

it should have a hidden factory recovery partition to do exactly that

Wait... Windows can reinstall itself? And all the proper drivers?

 

[mcnumpty23]

8gb of ram may be too low for heavily modded games

It does this on all games. Besides, it set both of them to ultra settings by default.

as already mentioned a clean re-install of windows would have been a good idea when you got it

for one it runs better than just trying to clean everything up

secondly its second hand and even though you have an anti virus and malwarebytes personally i would want to wipe anything left by the previous owner

I thought the same, but like I said I don't have an install disk nor do I have the proper disks to install all the drivers, so unless the computer can reinstall Windows and all the proper drivers on it's own, I can't do that.

yes it should be able to

it should have a hidden factory recovery partition to do exactly that

Wait... Windows can reinstall itself? And all the proper drivers?

yes it can reset it to exactly how it came out the factory

as long as the previous owner didnt delete the hidden recovery partition

 

[Iamthewalrus]

8gb of ram may be too low for heavily modded games

It does this on all games. Besides, it set both of them to ultra settings by default.

as already mentioned a clean re-install of windows would have been a good idea when you got it

for one it runs better than just trying to clean everything up

secondly its second hand and even though you have an anti virus and malwarebytes personally i would want to wipe anything left by the previous owner

I thought the same, but like I said I don't have an install disk nor do I have the proper disks to install all the drivers, so unless the computer can reinstall Windows and all the proper drivers on it's own, I can't do that.

yes it should be able to

it should have a hidden factory recovery partition to do exactly that

Wait... Windows can reinstall itself? And all the proper drivers?

yes it can reset it to exactly how it came out the factory

as long as the previous owner didnt delete the hidden recovery partition

That honestly seems great. There's like old World of Warcraft stuff I can't get off of here. Three questions: Are you sure? How would I do this? And how would I check to see if the hidden recovery partition is there?

 

[mcnumpty23]

for older dells

turn on then quickly press and hold ctrl + F11 key

sometimes takes a few tries to time that right

newer dells turn on and keep tapping F8--can be a real pain if fast boot is enabled though

scroll down to repair your computer option

press enter

then dell factory image restore

or since the pc works look for dell in the list of programs and see if one is a recovery software

 

[mcnumpty23]

to see if the partition is there

right click my pc

left click manage

choose storage in the right window

choose disk management

you will then see your hard disk and all the partitions on it

 

[mcnumpty23]

and the dell software to do it from in windows is probably called DataSafe Local Backup 2.0 or PC Restore

or similar

 

[mcnumpty23]

and when you see your hard disk in disk management its likely to have a few partitions on there

any small ones even if called recovery are likely part of windows--these should say under 500mb normally

if the dell one is there it will be anything up to maybe 15gb

 

[mcnumpty23]

late here so i am off

will check this thread tomorrow see how you got on

 

[Iamthewalrus]

I know that I have the latest GPU drivers. I tried testing my CPU temperature, and it didn't seem too bad at around 60 degrees, although I did notice that whenever it stuttered in game the CPU load increased to about 15% usually, then decreased gradually to about 5-7%. How would I check the first bullet you said? It's somewhat hot on and around the vents, and fans, and the keyboard is warm.

I also considered reinstalling Windows, but it was working at the time so I didn't want to risk anything... I don't have a disk or key on hand either so I couldn't. A friend said I could wipe it without it and it'd be fine... What I'm concerned about is the drivers, as I have no disks or anything to restore that with. Perhaps is there any way I could do that? It could fix it...

For checking on power options, just click on the battery icon in the bottom right and make sure that you're on "High Performance" mode when you're playing games. You should also check the Nvidia settings (Nvidia Control Panel I believe) for switchable graphics modes.

As for checking Intel Turboboost, just open the Task Manager or another program that monitors CPU speed and see if it goes faster than 2.6 GHz under load. If it does, then congrats, Turbo boost is on. If it's not, I'm not actually sure there's much you can do about it other than check your BIOS/UEFI for an option to enable it.

Hope any of this helps

Edit: also, drivers can be gotten quite easily from the manufacturers website if you decided to reinstall Windows.

According to the other guy helping me out, the drivers are already on there in the hidden drive partition. If they aren't though, there's easily like over 50 needed drivers... I have to download all of them manually if they're not already there?

 

[mcnumpty23]

hi again middle of night here but couldnt sleep

if the recovery partition is there then yes it will 100% contain all the needed drivers

they just wont be the latest versions so will have to run windows update to see if there are any newer versions

a recovery partition/factory reset is different to a clean install of windows in that it has everything the computer needs to function on that recovery including drivers

a clean install from a windows disc/usb is a different matter as it cant possibly cover every single possible driver

though as long as you have the driver needed for internet access all the others can be downloaded any way