I am having a very annoying and obtrusive issue with random hiccups or mini freezes while playing all my games. Hopefully one of you will feel like racking your brain and help a fellow gamer out. Most recently: Diablo 3, Heroes of the Storm, and GTA 5. It doesn't matter what graphics quality I set each to, every couple minutes I get a complete freeze for maybe 1 second where the fps drops to 0-15. While seemingly random, it is consistently happening anywhere between 1-3 minutes apart. All other game time is a solid 60fps or more. I monitored MSI Afterburner and noticed sharp spikes to 0% GPU usage on the graph. Temps on both GPU and CPU cores seem reasonable and I ran an Intel CPU stress test (passed) and a Furmark GPU stress test (no issues). I guess I just don't know where to look or what steps I could take. I have already reformatted my SSD and reinstalled Windows 7 x64 a couple times, tried the latest 3 Nvidia drivers, and checked if there were issues with the titles I have been trying. I don't have other parts I can swap with to test if it is the GPU, CPU, RAM, MOBO, or whatever else, so it is very frustrating. There's no doubt there are countless threads regarding similar issues I'm experiencing, but mine seems strange enough. Hopefully you can point me in the right direction. My current setup is as follows:
GPU: Gigabyte GTX 970
CPU: I5-4690K 3.50GHZ
RAM: G Skill Ripjaws 2x4gb
MOBO: Gigabyte z97x-sli
PSU: EVGA 850 B2
Here's a screenshot of all the hiccups shown in MSI Afterburner. My gpu drops to 0% usage for each of them as shown. http://s16.postimg.org/uum44bc7o/msi_results2.jpg
GPU: Gigabyte GTX 970
CPU: I5-4690K 3.50GHZ
RAM: G Skill Ripjaws 2x4gb
MOBO: Gigabyte z97x-sli
PSU: EVGA 850 B2
Here's a screenshot of all the hiccups shown in MSI Afterburner. My gpu drops to 0% usage for each of them as shown. http://s16.postimg.org/uum44bc7o/msi_results2.jpg