Windows 10: All games stutter and audio crackles after PC has been on for a few hours

Hi there,


At this point I'm lost on what to do. When I start up my PC, everything runs smoothly. After a few hours however usually after I've stopped using it and then come back any game or 3D application I run stutters horribly and audio crackles with the stutters. It's a really strange kind of stuttering too, almost like I'm rubber banding constantly, but it's not network related as it happens even in single player games.


I have tried;

Cleanly uninstalling and reinstalling all GPU drivers

Reinstalling Windows

Replacing PSU this did actually cause the problem to somehow go away for a week, but it came back


I just have no idea what's going on and it's getting extremely frustrating. The ONLY thing that fixes the issue once it starts happening is to restart my computer or sleep it and wake it, which makes me think this has to be some kind of driver/software issue since sleeping the pc and waking it fixes the issue

:)

 

Crackle/Popping Sound When Playing Audio + Stuttering Video Games

I just built a PC:

• ASUS ROG STRIX Z370-H GAMING
  
• Intel i7 8700k
  
• EVGA Geforce GTX 1080 FTW 8 GB
  
• Corsair RMx Series, RM750x 750w
  
• Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB SSD
  
• Seagate 2 TB FireCuda Gaming SSHD
  
• Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2x8GB) DDR4 DRAM 3200 MHz
  
• Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
  

Not currently OC'd, default specs.

Whenever I play audio (YouTube, foobar, VLC player, video games) I can hear a popping/crackling sound whenever I start or stop it. It's like the small crackle sound you hear when you plug in headphones/speakers. This also happens during playback, although not randomly – it's usually a specific part of the audio/video file that causes the popping. I can even find the particular "pop" spot and replay it.

Additionally, whenever I'm playing a video game I get random frame skips at random intervals. This happens in all my video games – WoW, Subnautica, Fallout 4, Dark Souls 3.

Originally I had the ASUS Prime z370-A which I thought to be the issue. But I replaced it with the ROG Strix and I can still hear the popping/crackling and the frame skips still happen.

Does anyone have experience with this issue? This is my first build over $1k and I'm very distressed that I cannot find the problem. Could it be the hard drives? RAM, maybe?

 

Audio crackling a few hours into session.

1) How old is the sound card? It might have a capacitor that is dying. When you are playing audio through the sound card the components heat up and over time the dying capacitors start to lose their ability to hold a proper charge. Restarting the PC temporarily solve the problem because the components have cooled down. It would be interesting to hear if your issues go away for a bit if you simply stop playing for a few minutes and start again.

2) What do you mean by crackling? Is it static, or popping, or is it jittery/stuttering, and does it happen randomly for a short period and stops or does it remain crackly until you restart?

3) When did this start happening; Does it coincide with you upgrading to Windows 10? Since I updated to Windows 10, my Creative E3 USB DAC started to randomly stutter when under nominal to high loads while playing games, with some games worse than others i.e. Not too bad in Metal Gear V but happens more frequently in The Witcher 3. COD BO3....ya it's almost unplayable. Even happens in Vally or Haven benchmarks. Rock solid in Mac OS X or connected to my iPod Touch.

*Toast :toast:

 

Audio crackling a few hours into session.

Sound card: ASUS Phoebus 7.1
Headset: Razer Tiamat 7.1
Operating system: Win 10

A few hours (between 2 and 10 hours) into all my gaming sessions in the past 2 months I have been getting severely crackling audio and I haven't the faintest idea what is causing it. I've tried fixes I've found on Google, updating the drivers and trying different settings, I disabled my overclock on the CPU (PSU not giving out enough power, so I tried changing power settings), but none of them work. Resetting the PC fixes the audio for a few hours before it starts again, so it might be a software thing.

Sometimes the PC itself starts to lag with the crackling audio with minimal load or when I'm playing a game, which leads me to believe it's more than an audio issue, but I thought it might be the audio issue causing the PC lag, because the system lag doesn't happen every time, only sometimes.

Help me TPU, you're my only hope!