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Last week I bought a new PC with these specs:

  • Mem: Kingston HyperX KHX1600C9D3K4/16GX
  • CPU: Intel Core I5 2500K Boxed
  • MoBo: Asus ROG Maximus IV GENE-Z
  • GPU: MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition/OC
  • Disk: 256GB Crucial C300 on SATA-600 port.
  • Monitor: Dell U2711 2560*1440

I already have the disk for a year and it always worked perfectly.

I installed Win 7 + the 150+ updates that go with it. Installed drivers for MoBo and GPU from the disk that came with it + updated GPU drivers to latest.

Ran FutureMark benchmark and 3DMark Vantage yielding expected results.

Installed and played Mass Effect 2 and Anno 2060 with no problems at all. These recent games run super smooth.

Installed steam and started the 10 GB download of Team Fortress 2, which is quite old and ran perfect on my previous 2 generations of computers. Hence my surprise to see it hang for a second about each 30 seconds, making the game unplayable.

There is a huge amount of things that I can attempt to narrow down the problem. I don't know where to start and what would be the most plausible cause.

=> I was hoping some advice on what to google for and what I can easily try to quickly narrow down the root cause.

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10
  • It's the game, nothing you can do about it. Someday it'll be patched away, later "fixed" back in. Same happend for years in TF2 (getting worse though).
    – ordag
    Commented Dec 8, 2011 at 17:23
  • Do you have any background information about this issue?
    – Thomas Stock
    Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 14:29
  • @ordag : any source?
    – Thomas Stock
    Commented Dec 12, 2011 at 11:46
  • 1
    personal experience in 3 years of playing that game
    – ordag
    Commented Dec 12, 2011 at 12:18
  • Coming back to this after a week... does this happen on all servers? I've noticed that there appear to be server freezing issues in recent updates, but usually not once a minute.
    – user2974
    Commented Dec 13, 2011 at 15:14

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
4

I had the same problems with a recent Windows 7 PC on various online games like Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends. This behavior is likely related to network other than CPU or GPU.

You should solve it my disabling network throttling feature in Windows 7:

  1. Open regedit with Administrator privileges
  2. Go to key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile
  3. Modify value of NetworkThrottlingIndex (default is 0x0000000a) to FFFFFFFF (0xFFFFFFFF)
  4. Reboot

enter image description here

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3

Check task manager to see if some other process is active twice a minute and taking up all your resources CPU/RAM/network.

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1
  • I've been playing yesterday with speedfan, task mngr and event viewer open on a second monitor. Didn't notice any maxxing out on the CPU, nor temperature issues.
    – Thomas Stock
    Commented Dec 8, 2011 at 8:38
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The first thing I'd try is toggling the Multicore Rendering setting in the TF2 Graphics Settings -> Advanced.

For whatever reason, it defaults to off, despite multiple core PCs now being the standard. Usually, you get more responsive gameplay with it turned on.

However, there have been numerous problems with this setting over the years, so if it is on, turning it off may fix the problem.

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5
  • it was enabled. I disabled it and restarted the game. For a few minutes I thought it was fixed, but then it came back.. :-(
    – Thomas Stock
    Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 17:00
  • @ThomasStock Darn, was worth a try though. I'm not really sure what other settings would cause a hang like that, though.
    – user2974
    Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 18:06
  • Are you really sure it is a cpu setting? I think it refers to MultiGPU Cards which is only available on high end graphic cards.
    – user12190
    Commented May 7, 2012 at 12:13
  • FYI, I solved the problem by changing some audio setting related to FPS. (something like, only update audio when ... is loaded). Now I only get the issue when some objective is completed or so. Note: This was in Alien Swarm, which runs on the HL2 engine. I suspect my TF2 issues will be fixable in the same way but I did not test this yet
    – Thomas Stock
    Commented May 10, 2012 at 0:44
  • @ThomasStock you are allowed and encouraged to answer your own questions.
    – kotekzot
    Commented May 15, 2013 at 7:00
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+25

Your issue does not belong to the hardware aspects like CPU or GPU i think.. You may run processes that are higher priorised, which disturb the execution of your TF.

kinda like additional antivirus or firewall software, other tuning tools may cause it, too... Maybe some win7 software which you hadn't had before, but now with the new pc

The way i think is something like crossaccessing on relevant files.

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5
  • I had this very same issue on both Windows XP, Windows 7, and even on a virtual machine on a clean installation of Win7 and nothing but Steam. This is certainly the game's problem.
    – user1306322
    Commented May 15, 2013 at 9:08
  • Another question back: are there many hackers on TF2? I am intersted in itk but i hate playing with hackers
    – Eveli
    Commented May 15, 2013 at 12:41
  • 1
    I've seen like three over the course of my 1800 hours of gameplay, but I last played like a year ago, so situation might have changed a bit. You can always report hackers on their steam page, they're usually pretty quickly dealt with.
    – user1306322
    Commented May 15, 2013 at 12:59
  • Glad to hear, then i will try it now ^^
    – Eveli
    Commented May 15, 2013 at 13:00
  • 1
    Antivirus can usually be the kicker. If you don't add the correct folders to the exception list, the AV will scan those files due to them getting wrote to and read by the application rapidly. Thus causing lag.
    – Simon
    Commented May 15, 2013 at 15:35

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