Odd stuttering on new laptop

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cuemasterfl

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I bought a new laptop yesterday. It's a Toshiba Satellite P875-S7102.

Specs:
Intel® Core™ i7-3630QM Processor
8GB DDR3 1600MHz memory
Windows 8

Full specs here if you need to know more: http://us.toshiba.com/computers/laptops/satellite/P870/P875-S7102/

I bought it as a replacement for my Desktop, which can play any game you throw at it. I want a laptop that can play all of my games, so I don't have to keep going on the desktop. It plays my games perfectly well, BUT, every now and then there's this "stutter" where things slow down big time, for a few seconds. Then, things go back to normal, smooth gameplay.

My question is: what is causing this "spike"? I'm VERY happy with this laptop, as it also caters to my serious side as a programmer with it's 1920 x 1080 res. I tried running the games in a lower res, such as 1366 x 768, but the stutter still occurs.

I have all of my windows updates. DirectX is up to date. Windows Update said there were no video card driver updates, so I must have the current drivers.

Thanks for any suggestions you can give.
 
I doubt it's a video rendering problem.

Here's the possible causes i can think of

1) Some program activates in the background during this time. Maybe antivirus? Maybe windows updates? Maybe some other program you have (perhaps preinstalled on the computer)? You can try to quickly alt tab when it happens and view the task manager. Or there maybe some program that logs this for you.

2) Some sort of power settings. Could be some glitch with the cpu going into some sort of low power state temporarily for some unknown reason. Try running a video in repeat in the background or turning off any power savings mode.

3) You have a slow hard drive and the game is loading some resources (maps, textures, etc). You could try to isolate this one by downloading a free ramdisk software that will create a virtual drive completely in your memory and installing the game there (warning, this drive is cleared every time you restart the computer). Try running the game from there and see if the same problem happens.
 
Hmmm, well, I am playing Deus Ex at the moment, and the stutter occurred, so I did an Alt Tab to task manager to check the CPU usage, and it was normal. But, I think that's because when this game detects that it's not the active window, it goes straight to pause mode.

So, I tried running it in a Window, with Task manager off to the right, and not once in about 10 minutes did it stutter. The CPU never went above about 20%. So now I am thinking it might just be when a game is in full screen mode.

I'll test more.
 
Could be so many things. Being that it's an intel igpu I'd go more toward vram for textures if you lowered res and it didn't help, but could also be a driver, could be the allocated amount of vram, etc etc.Could be a driver incompatibiity being that intel drivers aren't too great, could be hyperthreading, try disabling that if you can. Check your C1E/EIST as well and set it to high performance.
 
I've continued playing in a window, while monitoring the task manager, and the stutter has occurred a few times but when i glance at the task manager, everything seems normal. The CPU usage doesn't go above around 20%, ram usage is around 800mb, and the disk activity for this game is 0. I tried removing the sound drivers, and rebooting, as I had a suspicion it could be related to that, but that didn't change anything.

If I disable Hyperthreading, wouldn't that half the power of my CPU? (sorry if this is a noob question).
 
Ok, I just did some research on Hyperthreading, and whether I should disable it or not. It seems like i should give it a go. I'll report back after I've done some testing with it disabled.
 
On a laptop I bet it's CPU throttling. It's a pretty common problem on laptops running at max.
 
I believe I have resolved it. Someone sent me a private message, and his suggestion seems to be working. I did ask him if it was ok to post it here, and no response yet, but I don't see the problem, so here it is. I went into msconfig, clicked the Boot tab, and the Advanced button. Here, I was able to disable 4 processors. When I rebooted, and played my games, everything runs super smooth all of the time. The only question I now have is should I disable 5-8, or 2,4,6,8? I have disabled 5-8 at the moment but not sure that's the right thing to do.
 
Also, my windows experience scores are the same as they were before I made the changes.
 
Seems like a bandaid.

Have you tried installing drivers from toshiba's site and not from windows update?
 
I tried that, after you mentioned it (after i re-enabled all cores), but it didn't change anything.
 
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