FPS Drops and stutters

[DizzasTeR]

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@Photoray002 wrote:

Lesson learned.  Spend your money on a NEW computer next time. Don't buy someone else's problems.

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Well can't really spend on new ones if there aren't new ones available in the first place.

However I followed the disk part steps, cleaned it and re-initialized it, still getting the same error

[Photoray002]

I got ya.

I don't know then, it doesn't like that drive most likely.

You could try installing the diagnostics in Windows, just never seemed to work as good.

http://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp98501-99000/sp98602.exe

I would say make sure your bios is up to date, but that really doesn't solve this issue. Besides with all the trouble you're having,  a bios update could fail and corrupt, then your system would be bricked for sure.

Not much else I know to do for ya, I'm sorry.

[DizzasTeR]

I actually have been able to update BIOS successfully on this before, just haven't checked till now again if there's any more updates but yeah BIOS update didn't fail or end up corrupted.

Anyhow I guess then the only assumption is that the GPU is kind of 'broken' I guess, unlucky for me, guess I'll just drag this as hard as I can and just accept how it is then.

Thank you for helping.

[MaPo31415]

Hi pal, could you share list of top processes right after you stumble upon this stutter? Sort for CPU and Disk usage. Look for "System" process specifically - what's its CPU usage AFTER the stutter? Is it around 14% or is it below 1%? Also, please note the timestamp of the occurence of a single stutter and search your Event Viewer against it - your OS might be doing something extensive under the hood you are not aware of. I've had similiar problems as stuttering (also audio stuttering) is one of the symptoms of botched firmware causing interrupt storm, which in turn makes your userland (games etc.) compete with with interrupt handlers for resources on a kernel level - it might not be the case, but let's give it a try.

Also, Photoray002, critique of second hand devices without solid proof is not valid, just take a look at track history of legendary Lenovo/IBM ThinkPads, these laptops are seemingly immortal. If you are aware of the bigger picture of what's going on on this community you'd notice that other people are reporting the same stutter problem (and some other common ones), thus it is not a singular case and throwing money at it would not guarantee any improvement, if the problem lies within vendor development-QA pipeline. My HP Zbook had it's problems ever since I bought it, as do many of my fellow brothers-in-misery being first owners of HP Omen laptops.

[Photoray002]

@MaPo31415  Please don't tell me Im not aware of whats going on in the community when Ive been here a whole lot longer than you have. You have a beef with opinions, please do it through a PM, not the open forum. Thanks  😉

[DizzasTeR]

Yeah so I did try to catch some processes with task manager right with the freeze, and I did notice 'System' in there topping up and then going back down, I started my game again and after the stutter I quickly switched to task manager and System process was around 1.4% 2nd to the game when sorted in terms of CPU usage until it went down.

Thanks

[MaPo31415]

We can rule out pernament interrupt storm then. What is an average interval of these stutters?

[DizzasTeR]

On page 2 I've posted a video link, thats the biggest I've had so far, the other ones I have are very small, but very noticeable, its like fps goes from 260 to 220 or 157 after that very small fraction of stutter.

But yeah mainly the video one is the longest freeze I had, the others could be a little less than that or very small but annoying.

[MaPo31415]

There are many factors that might cause stutters. I'd start diagnostics with launching AIDA64 stress test view without running actual stress test, then launch some game. AIDA64 would show you plot over time of frequencies, wattage, voltage and occurences of CPU throttling. If problem are caused by CPU itself, we'd expect spikes here. Also I noticed that Intel Thermal Frameworks (DPTF is its newest iteration, but even if you uninstall it a generic fallback is getting installed) are able to modify package max TPD to absurdly low values on-fly, either by design or due to some bug introducted in driver/firmware. I used AIDA64 quite some time ago, but I believe that you might get some readings from GPU and storage devices too.

Then there are events triggered by faulty sensors, cmd aborts and bus errors of the storage etc. But focus on sorting out what does your CPU do when your problem occurs for now. You might want to use Windows Performance Recorder too - you'd be able to share etl file of the recording for others to analyze.