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Don't worry if this feels confusing — we'll walk through it together, one step at a time. Hi everyone. I have been trying to diagnose a strange system-wide responsiveness issue for several months. System CPU: Ryzen 9 9950X3D GPU: Palit RTX 5060 Ti Infinity 3 16GB Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX X870E-H GAMING WIFI7 BIOS: Tested 2101, 2202 and currently 2402; issue persists on all versions RAM: 64GB Crucial Pro DDR5-6000 CL40, 2×32GB, EXPO I PSU: Seasonic Focus GX-1000, 1000W, 80+ Gold Cooling: Arctic Liquid Freezer III Pro Case: NZXT H6 Flow Monitor: iiyama G-Master GB2771QSU, DisplayPort OS: Official clean installation of Windows 11 Pro 25H2 GPU drivers: Multiple NVIDIA versions tested with DDU; 596.21 feels noticeably smoother than newer releases Chipset driver: Latest AMD chipset driver dated 30 July 2026 Background The RTX 5060 Ti was originally used in my previous i7-8700/Z370 system. After moving to AM5, I initially kept the old Windows installation, then later performed a completely clean Windows 11 installation. The reinstall changed some symptoms, but never fixed the underlying trouble Symptoms The trouble affects the whole system, not only games: Random Windows UI lag and choppy animations. Dragging windows sometimes feels like desktop FPS suddenly drops. DWM occasionally behaves strangely. Before reinstalling Windows, some minimised windows would not restore correctly. Micro-stutters while typing in Chrome, Edge and Firefox. Roughly every 8–15 characters, input pauses briefly and one or two CPU threads spike. I can hear the CPU fans ramp up momentarily. YouTube videos often take unusually long to begin playback, even with a clean browser profile and no extensions. Games maintain high average FPS but still feel inconsistent. CS2 runs above 350 FPS, but frame pacing and 0.1% lows feel poor. NVIDIA driver 596.21 consistently feels smoother than newer drivers. During Windows boot, after the ASUS logo and loading circle, the monitor briefly loses signal before the Windows login screen appears. LatencyMon Before reinstalling Windows, LatencyMon usually reported nvlddmkm.sys, sometimes above approximately 3500 µs. After the clean installation, ACPI.sys is usually the highest entry, commonly around 1500 µs. Stability The hardware appears stable: OCCT: approximately 1.5 hours, no errors or WHEA. TestMem5: zero errors. No CPU calculation errors. The only instability occurred with all-core Curve Optimizer at -25, which occasionally froze at idle. Current Curve Optimizer is per CCD: CCD0: -15 CCD1: -5 The system was also previously stable at -15/-25, but I reduced it during troubleshooting. Memory configuration DDR5-6000, UCLK=MCLK 3000/3000, FCLK 2000, 1T, GDM enabled. Main timings: 36-36-36-36-84 tRC 124, tWR 84, tRFC 1200, tRFC2 704, tRFCsb 608, tREFI 50000 Voltages: DRAM VDD/VDDQ: 1.35V CPU VDDIO: 1.35V VSOC: approximately 1.25V VDDG CCD/IOD: approximately 1.05V CLDO VDDP: approximately 0.90V Memory Context Restore and Power Down are disabled. DDR Training Runtime Reduction is enabled. Troubleshooting already performed Windows and drivers Clean Windows 11 25H2 installation. Multiple NVIDIA drivers installed using DDU. HAGS on/off. MPO on/off. Game Mode on/off. Balanced and High Performance power plans. CPU minimum/maximum states tested at 5/100, 10/100 and 100/100. 100/100 provides a slight improvement but does not troubleshoot the issue. NVIDIA Prefer Maximum Performance tested with little improvement. Minimal background software and clean browser profiles. Browsers Tested Chrome, Edge and Firefox with: Hardware acceleration on/off. Smooth scrolling on/off. No extensions or AdBlock. Fresh profiles. The issue remains in all browsers. BIOS and platform settings Tested combinations of: EXPO I and manual memory settings. FCLK 2000 and 2133. Memory Context Restore on/off. Power Down on/off. CPPC Preferred Cores Auto/Driver. Global C-States on. DF C-States on/off. Native ASPM and CPU PCIe ASPM on/off. Power Supply Idle Control set to Typical Current Idle. USB4 controller on/off. Integrated graphics on/off. Different PBO, Curve Optimizer and PPT/TDC/EDC settings. Ironically, mostly automatic BIOS settings provide the best overall behaviour. Peripherals and display Mouse: Attack Shark X11. Tested different USB ports and 500/1000Hz polling. 500Hz feels slightly more responsive but less smooth. Keyboard: Royal Kludge, tested across different USB ports. Monitor: Tested multiple DisplayPort cables, Adaptive Sync on/off, Direct Drive Mode on/off and different overdrive levels. Overdrive level 2 feels best. NVIDIA Control Panel: Tested G-Sync, V-Sync, Low Latency Mode, maximum performance, shader cache and other settings. iGPU test Enabling the iGPU, setting it to Forced, assigning a 512MB UMA Frame Buffer and enabling GFXOFF produced a slight improvement. However, the issue still occurs in DWM, the Windows UI, browsers and video playback. Additional observations The GPU has been heavily used in Gothic 1, Oblivion Remastered, The Last of Us Part I, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Dota 2, CS2, PUBG and ARC Raiders. It has never shown artifacts, crashes, driver resets, black screens or obvious hardware instability. Because of this, I do not currently believe the GPU itself is faulty. The problem feels more like periodic platform latency affecting DWM, ACPI, PCIe, USB, the chipset or Windows scheduling rather than a lack of CPU/GPU performance. At this point I am trying to determine whether the likely cause is: Windows or driver behaviour; the AMD platform/chipset; the motherboard; CPU I/O or ACPI behaviour; or another hardware fault. Any ideas or similar experiences would be appreciated. submitted by /u/Perfect_Gap_5303 [link] [comments] You did it! Bookmark this page in case you need it again later.
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