Frame drops

[BIGB3AR]

Ok so lately my games have been experiencing extreme frame drops. In any game I experience it. I started to keep an eye on my performance monitor to try and figure out why it happens. So I kept an eye and saw my memory that there is always 3 GB of my ram in chache so I thought it might be it, but I realised my games don't need any aditional ram to run so kept looking, secondly I thought no it's my cpu that constantly have usage spikes, but My cpu is at a stable 10-20% most of the time, but then just now I saw my disk usage and saw no it drops to lik 3% and then sudenly spikes too 100% and it's a constant drop and spike in one second intervals. So my hard drive is obviously the problem, but do I replace it? It's a laptop that's 5 years old this year, but it has preper specks. It just seems like my disk pegged.

[bmac1191]

What games, settings, and specs? It is most likely running out of ram and/or vram. In most cases when this happens it writes to the pagefile on the hard drive, which I assume is a slow platter drive. This would cause massive FPS spikes.

Try playing an old game that your laptop should easily run and see if it happens.

Five years is ancient for a laptop. The technology has improved greatly. Sorry to say but it is very outdated.

[BIGB3AR]

Oh I know it's greatly outdated, but should perform well for the games I play, It's League of legends, Skyrim, unturned and the occasional Guild Wars 2.

The Specs are as follows:
- Ram : 6 GB(5.92 Usable)
- Processor : core i5-2410M CPU @ 2.30 GH
- GPU : GeForce GT 525M
- Resolution : 1366 x 768, 60Hz

I do play Total War Rome from 2005 now and then and I also experience it while playing that game.

[DrMaffick]

Well your bottleneck is the GT525M and the Processor. And the way you described your problem, probably need SSD as the laptop HDD is usually the slow one if you are using the same HDD (5400RPM). Even if you decide to increase your page size it will not help as the pagesize is still on the slow HDD. Your memory runs out to compensate the CPU & GPU and then tries to write back and forth on your HDD to access additional memory.

Sorry to say you just have an outdated laptop as "bmac1191" said it

[BIGB3AR]

and if I replace the HDD, with say an SSD or just replace the HDD with a New one, would that make a difference?

[_I_]

ssd will make load times faster, but not help at all with fps
for some games it will help with frame drops

[BIGB3AR]

Yeah that's the idea, I can get 60 fps on league with what I have, but keeping it there is the problem. I don't need an increase in fps I literelly just need my games to have a good stable fps. Oh and just for some clarity, I might say frame drops, but it's basically frame freezes, almost like the game freezes, but it resumes play for like a second maybe two and then it starts again.

[_I_]

if its getting drops due to loading or disk activity while playing the ssd will help
but if its due to other problems it will not

the i5m is fine for lol
but the gt card is too weak for many newer games

lower game settigns and res, if that does not help, the ssd might

[Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism]

The GPU is low-end and on the laptops the i5s aren't quad-cores (in your case 2.3-2.9 GHz dual-core with hyper-threading), to read as much as possibly from the HDD once you actually do read from it is likely something you want too, if the spikes happen while playing and not for just loading maps or so maybe an SSD would help if the drops happen when it may load stuff (which I don't know when that may happen, entering houses on Skyrim maybe? Leaving an area in Skyrim?)

If you eventually get an SSD and try and it doesn't help then at-least you could use the same SSD for a computer if you decided to build one. (R7 360 + i3 6100 + H110 mobo + 8 GB of RAM won't be the best but won't be all that expensive and still better.)

[_I_]

yes most i5m are duals, but lol doesnt need more than 2 cores+ht anyway

fast notebook ram wont make much of a diff either, the gt card uses its own ram

[vadim]

Początkowo opublikowane przez _I_:

yes most i5m are duals

ALL of them. Sorry, I was wrong - highest Skylake mobile i5 are quad core now. i5-6300HQ, i5-6350HQ and i5-6440HQ.