Hi Guys, I hope someone will be able to help me as I am pulling my hair over this. I've built myself a new gaming / 3d editing / animation rig, here are the specs: Intel Core i7 6700k (Skylake) 4ghz Asus Maximus VIII HERO Z170 Motherboard 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 Ram (2400 mhz) chosen from the compatible RAM list ASUS STRIX NVIDIA Geforce GTX 970 4GB WIN 7 Ultimate I have ****-ton of HDD's but the system is on SSD, and games on SSHD drives. This is my n-th build. I have done this tens if not hundreds of times already, for my self, for my family and for friends. I always do my research and I try to look for potential problems before I buy. Boy was I wrong this time. Idea was to get better components for my next build, I game a lot and I also do a lot of 3D editing. The problem: Before I tell you what exactly is the issue here, let me tell you what happened when I was building my rig. I have put everything together and on the first run asus mobo was reporting no RAM installed. After double checking that the serial numbers are on the list of compatible ram vendors I started to look through internet. After few hours I have found a post where some dude was reporting the same issue. His problem was too tight CPU cooler. I was like, surely not... It wasn't even that tight! I never apply stupid amount of pressure and I always use extra washers. Anyhow, after loosening four screws my new PC finally booted HOORAY! Installed windows 7 ultimate with no problems and I installed software that came with the mobo. Then I started to notice these problems (only in desktop mind you, no games are affected): Extremely poor performance in any desktop app Keyboard lag and mouse lag Translating windows lag (moving opened windows around) Any software that relies only on CPU and RAM (like Dos Box) is lagging too. Any software that needs to output lots of lines to the screen is lagging badly (no matter if it is network app or app that works locally) Cmd shell (dos shell) is lagging when entering safe mode (i thought I'll include this as it is something I've noticed). So imagine you enter safe mode and you have the shell with all the .sys files being loaded. One after another. On my i5 this would last few seconds, the list of the sys files would zip through the screen and boom I am in. Here it takes it around a second to two seconds to load each sys file (!) I mean wtf. It actually takes about 45 - 60 seconds to boot to safe mode. Forget about using PuTTy - Lags every so often, not bad now but was a lot worse at the beginning (read on what I did in the 'What I tried so far') Take MySQL Workbench, you load a query and you have returned 1000 rows from database. Those rows are fetched temporarily to your memory. When I try to scroll the list of the items the whole screen freezes and tears, then it will lag for another 2 - 3 seconds and finally it will update and show me where I am on the list. List can go on, scrolling long file texts. Loading large files to any IDE and then working of that IDE and god forbid you try to scroll too fast. Now weird bit, somehow my performance is not affected in games or for example in Blender. I did get 'Video Kernel has stopped working and it recovered' errors couple of times but then I downgraded drivers and I was ok. (I've read that Nvidia rushed the Division drivers and they were rather unstable) What I tried Removed all Asus bloatware (I've learned that the KeyBOOT manager causes Lag in PuTTy and other network programs and indeed after removing it PuTTy was usable again, for example remote desktop connection was also affected) Cleaned the system (reg and all) Reinstalled the system (what a pain in the arse) Disabled power saving feature on my SSD (found out that the incompatible older SSDs can cause mouse and keyboard lag if used on Motherboards that support this power saving feature name of which I forgot) - this has fixed most of the issues with mouse and keyboard lag but not all Updated bios Stress tested the CPU, RAM and GPU and all passed flawlessly Checked temps. CPU never got hotter that 44C (I use the close loop liquid cooling from CoolerMaster) GPU never got hotter than 65C. Ram had no errors. Checked the power draw - I have 750W Gold PSU, my power draw on max use is always well below 500 W mark. Inspected CPU pins on the motherboard and checked it for any damage I am as baffled as I am angry, what else can it be? Faulty SSD? Incompatible components? Is the CPU cooler still too tight? - trust me if I started to undo the screws even more I would risk having this cooler just hang there in general vicinity of the CPU instead of being on it. I hope there is someone that has the slightest idea what else I can try to fix this. Thanks for all and any help!
