Nuclear Cowboy
New member
- Sep 18, 2015
- 1
I am now on day 3 of this fight with my computer. The problem occurred after installing a new GTX960 GPU in place of an underpowered GTS250. My entire computer suddenly became agonizingly slow... the sound is popping and stuttering whenever a sound is played, the graphics on screen are lagging and stuttering also. CPU usage is at a constant 60%-100% even when no programs are running. Even as I type this out, the words do not appear on the screen until about 2-5 seconds after I type them. Over the past 3 days, slowly but surely, I've gotten far enough to diagnose the problem that's causing these symptoms, but I've hit a dead-end trying to figure out what's causing the problem.
When I look at my system performance monitor, I can see that the program responsible for the high CPU load is "Deferred Procedure Calls and Interrupt Service Routines" (DPC and ISR). After doing some research about what that program is responsible for, it made sense that it would be causing everything to go agonizingly slow if there is too much latency in the DPCs and ISRs. I found a helpful thread in the tutorials section of this forum, "How to Diagnose and Fix DPC Latency Issues" I used LatencyMon to track down the specific driver(s) causing the DPC/ISR latency. After doing a 1-minute trace with LatencyMon, these were my results:
As you can see, LatencyMon shows "dxgkrnl.sys" as the driver responsible for most of the ISR interrupts and "nvlddmkm.sys" is the driver responsible for the most DPC calls.
"dxgkrnl.sys" = Direct X Graphics Kernel
"nvlddmkm.sys" = NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode
Both of which are graphics-related drivers (which makes sense, considering the component that was changed was a graphics card). This is the point at which I've hit a dead end. I identified the problem driver(s), but I don't know what to do now.
My first idea was that it may be caused by an audio conflict. The reason: my old GPU did not have any audio outputs, so audio for the entire system was handled via the motherboard's High Definition Audio controller. When I installed this new GPU, I noticed that the driver installation included several additional options for audio output like audio through HDMI as well as its own High Definition Audio. When I checked in Windows Device Manager, I saw that the new NVIDIA High Definition Audio controller and the motherboard's on-board controller were sharing the same PCI bus location attempting to do essentially the same job as one another. So I disabled one of them, rebooted, didn't fix anything. Disabled the other one, rebooted, same thing. I then went into the BIOS menu and disabled the motherboard's HDA controller before booting, and still no change (and yes, my BIOS is also up to date). I then uninstalled all NVIDIA drivers using "Driver Sweeper" to make sure that I removed everything, then rebooted again and reinstalled the latest NVIDIA drivers with a clean install. It still did not work. I just need to know what my next step should be.
Here are all of the relevant specs you may want to know before helping me:
Motherboard: XFX MD-X58i-CH09
Processor: Intel Core i7 920
Graphics: GeForce GTX960
Power: Corsair GS700
RAM: 6GB
OS: Windows 7 x64
When I look at my system performance monitor, I can see that the program responsible for the high CPU load is "Deferred Procedure Calls and Interrupt Service Routines" (DPC and ISR). After doing some research about what that program is responsible for, it made sense that it would be causing everything to go agonizingly slow if there is too much latency in the DPCs and ISRs. I found a helpful thread in the tutorials section of this forum, "How to Diagnose and Fix DPC Latency Issues" I used LatencyMon to track down the specific driver(s) causing the DPC/ISR latency. After doing a 1-minute trace with LatencyMon, these were my results:
As you can see, LatencyMon shows "dxgkrnl.sys" as the driver responsible for most of the ISR interrupts and "nvlddmkm.sys" is the driver responsible for the most DPC calls.
"dxgkrnl.sys" = Direct X Graphics Kernel
"nvlddmkm.sys" = NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode
Both of which are graphics-related drivers (which makes sense, considering the component that was changed was a graphics card). This is the point at which I've hit a dead end. I identified the problem driver(s), but I don't know what to do now.
My first idea was that it may be caused by an audio conflict. The reason: my old GPU did not have any audio outputs, so audio for the entire system was handled via the motherboard's High Definition Audio controller. When I installed this new GPU, I noticed that the driver installation included several additional options for audio output like audio through HDMI as well as its own High Definition Audio. When I checked in Windows Device Manager, I saw that the new NVIDIA High Definition Audio controller and the motherboard's on-board controller were sharing the same PCI bus location attempting to do essentially the same job as one another. So I disabled one of them, rebooted, didn't fix anything. Disabled the other one, rebooted, same thing. I then went into the BIOS menu and disabled the motherboard's HDA controller before booting, and still no change (and yes, my BIOS is also up to date). I then uninstalled all NVIDIA drivers using "Driver Sweeper" to make sure that I removed everything, then rebooted again and reinstalled the latest NVIDIA drivers with a clean install. It still did not work. I just need to know what my next step should be.
Here are all of the relevant specs you may want to know before helping me:
Motherboard: XFX MD-X58i-CH09
Processor: Intel Core i7 920
Graphics: GeForce GTX960
Power: Corsair GS700
RAM: 6GB
OS: Windows 7 x64
