Hi everyone,
Recently my PC started experiencing ludicrously long boot times, horrendous stuttering and A&V lag issues at all times, even on the desktop. Frame times in the driver were reported often spiking around 200-300ms (1-5 times per second), while playing older games such as CSS and any sort of heavier gaming or intensive workload would cripple the pc, although it would not crash or overheat at all. HW Monitor reports that all cores are at a stable boost and the max temp under load is 69(c).
Closer inspection in task manager reveals Core 0 is close to 100% usage almost all of the time, even at idle. When under even minor workloads, such as notepad++ or paint, system responsiveness is significantly worse.
Initially I assumed this must be related to one of the two recent major changes to my system, a GPU upgrade and trying out Windows 11. But this turned out not to be the case as downgrading to a fresh Windows 10 install on a wiped drive doesn't change anything, and changing back to my old GPU (after uninstalling and re-installing appropriate drivers) doesn't fix the issue either.
To highlight the issue CPU-Z Benchmark shows solid multi-threaded performance, but single core performance that is more than 20 times worse than the older Ryzen 5 1600
I've pretty much tried everything from BIOS flashes, CMOS resets, sfc, service updates, resitting the cpu, re-plugging in all the power cables, re-sitting both new and old gpus, resitting the ram and changing slots, applying new thermal paste, checking the CPU pins and slot for any residue paste or damage etc etc.
The issues persist while no errors are reported by windows or at post, thermals are perfectly fine (although EDC is always in the red in RM, even with Ryzen Balanced Profile and all chipset drivers installed, I've tried wiping them and re-installing to no avail.)
I've tried installing a number of Linux distros on a different drive and for whatever reason the system would not allow me to even boot from the Live USB with my RX6600 XT installed (using any of the 4 distros I tried), while only the installation of Ubuntu actually completed with the R9 390X, this installation fails to boot when loaded.
While using the Live USB with PopOS or Ubuntu interestingly system monitor didn't report the same high load on one single core, instead having reasonable load across all cores, but system responsiveness was still poor and although better, lags and audio glitches were still frequent.
At this point I'm fairly confident that something is broken in hardware, and that it's probably the mobo or the cpu but would anyone be able to advise me which?
If it helps here is my system:
GPU: RX 6600 XT
CPU: RYZEN 5 2600 6 CORE 12 THREADS
Motherboard: ASUS TUF B450 Plus Gaming
BIOS Version: 3204
RAM: 16GB TEAMGROUP 3000MHZ VENGANCE
PSU: CORSAIR RM750x Modular ATX PSU
Operating System & Version: WINDOWS 10 PRO 19043
GPU Drivers: Adrenalin Driver Version: 21.8.2
Thanks for your time
