Hello, this will be my first post here on these forums so let me start by saying this website seems to have a ton of information available so please direct me to another post if I've missed a topic regarding this elsewhere.
This past year I used a portion of my tax return to purchase the 7-year old piece o' junk I had struggled with for ages. Here's what I ended up with:
Intel Core 2 Q6600 processor : 2.4 Ghz
4 Gb RAM
NVidia 9500 GT
OS: Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit
This was a pre-made system so no assembly was done by myself personally and all settings were stock on my machine until after my issue was discovered. Therefore, nothing was altered post-purchase which would have caused what ended up occuring.
Now on to the problem...
I play alot of games on my machine. That being said, that is where I am having difficulties. Back in late May of this year I started noticing that occasionally I would be playing and it almost seemed as if the game were briefly paused but only for a half second or so. The game in question was World of Warcraft so I immediately went through their troubleshooting process, including turning in-game settings up/down/off and thereafter changing settings on User Account Control, Drive Indexing and other OS-based processes to diagnose my problem. None of those worked and in the end I just quit the game altogether. Only then to realize that while playing Fallout 3, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and even now Borderlands that the issue persists in these games as well.
The pause is, like I mentioned above, very brief and is not associated with sound distortion or any on-screen artifacts or tearing. It's almost as if the game "hiccups" for a brief moment and then goes back to normal. At first, the anomaly was happening in WoW approximately every 4-5 minutes. Playing Borderlands the past couple days the frequency has drastically increased to occur almost every 5-10 seconds but the duration of the pause is still exactly the same. I have read multiple other forums for someone reporting a problem similar to this but as of yet have found nothing quite like this.
Right now I have both EVGA Precision running on my computer as well as NVidia Performance Monitor to keep tabs on the temps on my graphics card. Idle, I'm running @ 44 degrees C and under the heaviest stress loads it jumps up to ~60 degrees C which as far as I can tell isn't anything out of the ordinary. I have also checked my CPU temps in BIOS after playing and that temp is a relatively stable 34 degrees C. I have checked all my cables, done a thorough air-can cleaning and have even looked to make sure my PSU is still functioning properly. I really am out of ideas and hope someone can shed some light on this monstrous problem and equally monstrous post...
P.S. I should also add that it is NOT a general framerate issue as I have watched my frame per second function in most of these games and they run perfectly smoothly until the pause occurs.
This past year I used a portion of my tax return to purchase the 7-year old piece o' junk I had struggled with for ages. Here's what I ended up with:
Intel Core 2 Q6600 processor : 2.4 Ghz
4 Gb RAM
NVidia 9500 GT
OS: Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit
This was a pre-made system so no assembly was done by myself personally and all settings were stock on my machine until after my issue was discovered. Therefore, nothing was altered post-purchase which would have caused what ended up occuring.
Now on to the problem...
I play alot of games on my machine. That being said, that is where I am having difficulties. Back in late May of this year I started noticing that occasionally I would be playing and it almost seemed as if the game were briefly paused but only for a half second or so. The game in question was World of Warcraft so I immediately went through their troubleshooting process, including turning in-game settings up/down/off and thereafter changing settings on User Account Control, Drive Indexing and other OS-based processes to diagnose my problem. None of those worked and in the end I just quit the game altogether. Only then to realize that while playing Fallout 3, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and even now Borderlands that the issue persists in these games as well.
The pause is, like I mentioned above, very brief and is not associated with sound distortion or any on-screen artifacts or tearing. It's almost as if the game "hiccups" for a brief moment and then goes back to normal. At first, the anomaly was happening in WoW approximately every 4-5 minutes. Playing Borderlands the past couple days the frequency has drastically increased to occur almost every 5-10 seconds but the duration of the pause is still exactly the same. I have read multiple other forums for someone reporting a problem similar to this but as of yet have found nothing quite like this.
Right now I have both EVGA Precision running on my computer as well as NVidia Performance Monitor to keep tabs on the temps on my graphics card. Idle, I'm running @ 44 degrees C and under the heaviest stress loads it jumps up to ~60 degrees C which as far as I can tell isn't anything out of the ordinary. I have also checked my CPU temps in BIOS after playing and that temp is a relatively stable 34 degrees C. I have checked all my cables, done a thorough air-can cleaning and have even looked to make sure my PSU is still functioning properly. I really am out of ideas and hope someone can shed some light on this monstrous problem and equally monstrous post...
P.S. I should also add that it is NOT a general framerate issue as I have watched my frame per second function in most of these games and they run perfectly smoothly until the pause occurs.