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Question

Games freezing randomly for a split of a second (Windows 10)

Mar 18, 2018 5:08PM PDT

Hello. So I'm dealing with this problem for so long so far that I've decided to get rid of it, but I can't find any solution. That's one of very few computer problems that I can't solve myself. Games are randomly freezing to me for a moment and I have no idea why. I have a recent Windows installation (like 1 week old) and it happened to me before and also after the new installation. I have a new hardware and I really don't remember whether it happened to my on an old one.



My specs are:

My setup:
cpu: i5-7600k
gpu: gtx 1060 6gb
power supply: aerokcas-600
ram: hyperx 2x 8gb (3000MHz CL15, no paging file on purpose coz of big ram, paging file doesn't help)
ssd: Intel SSD 530 Series 120GB (system disk)
hdd: some WD 1TB
motherboard: gigabyte z270 k3 gaming

I've done some testing that led me to tune down CPU from 4.6 to 4.2 because Prime95 did stop two workers after a bunch of minutes and now it went fluently with a 3 hours test. Furmark is fine too, temperatures are good.
Prove: https://imgur.com/a/tS2n8
Also I recorded how these freezes look like (with a task manager opened, not much you can see there but at least we can see that disk usage is not 100% when the freeze occurs).
https://youtu.be/Fr21Ic0qtGI
The movie shows that when the freeze occurs, it starts from around 80fps after it.

And today I noticed a strange behavior. I have two displays, and when I play CS:GO I can't move my mouse cursor on the second display without leaving a game or at least launching menu. But when freeze occured I'm 90% sure that I saw a mouse cursor on a second display (I think it was moving but not sure), and it disappeared when freeze ended. Help me, please!

Discussion is locked

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Clarification Request
Why is the disk use so high?
Mar 18, 2018 5:49PM PDT
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Disk usage is low
Mar 19, 2018 3:36AM PDT
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Other areas to look into.
Mar 19, 2018 8:10AM PDT
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Speccy report
Mar 19, 2018 8:27AM PDT
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Answer
Overclocked ?
Mar 19, 2018 8:50AM PDT

Maybe return CPU to stock ?
Just guessing here Blush

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Unfortunetaly not
Mar 19, 2018 9:44AM PDT

Unfortunetaly not, tuning down memory frequency and cpu did not help, in fact I had first freeze 1 minute after I launched it. Moreover I really feel they also occur in a operating system
.

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Answer
Sorry we already went over this.`
Mar 19, 2018 2:17PM PDT
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Answer
SOLUTION
Mar 20, 2018 2:31PM PDT

Hi again. So I finally find a reason for these freezes. I have used a software called UIforETW, this program records all the activity on computer (CPU, GPU, Storage and so on) and can run infinitly due to a circular buffer. When something weird occurs, you just stop recording and save your scores to a file and if you open it you see a lot of informations. And in the software I found that one process was causing a freeze. Game process CPU usage went down from 70% to 2% while the freeze occured and disk usage went from around 0% to 100%. The process was called msmpeng.exe. I've done a research and it turned out that this is a Windows Defender Antymalware software. I turned it off and voila, everything works fine.


SHORT SOLUTION DESCRIPTION:

- used software called UIforETW

- found out that process msmpeng.exe caused freezes

- got rid of this process (in this case I turned off Windows defender and turned off antymalware software in taskschd.msc)


Thank you all for the help.