Hi, I am new here; I tried to post in the most relevent topic but my problem may be more broad than hardware. Please point me to the right topic if this is the incorrect one.
tl;dr:
(1) My computer has good hardware for gaming but runs very poorly at strange times..
(2) Boot times are unreasonably long, and the computer is unusable for ~30 minutes.
(3) On intensive games or games with uncapped frame-rates, white "flickers" occasionally occur on screen, and a constant background audio "buzz" can be heard.
I am hoping for some advice on how to fix my computer's performance, or at least point me in a good direction to troubleshoot.
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My computer is primarily used for gaming, but experiences a lot of "lag" (taking an unreasonable amount of time to start programs, software becomes unresponsive, explorer.exe frequently crashes and must be restarted) even when doing the most basic things, such as using windows file explorer to find a program shortcut.
It also takes ~10 minutes to boot up, and after that once I log in it usually runs so slowly that it takes around 20 minutes before it is usable. Programs that I try to start will not start for up to 5 minutes, and once they do they often function so slowly that they appear unresponsive (but if I wait, they do eventually work). I have tried general fixes such as defragging, checking for malware and rootkits, cleaning up junk files, etc. I have disabled all unneeded startup programs as well, but startup times remain slow.
I am using a prebuilt ASUS computer, but I upgraded the power supply and GPU a couple of months ago.
My computer currently has this hardware:
CPU Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz
GPU AMD Radeon R9 270X
Memory 8.2 GB
Power Supply Rosewill Hive 850W
Motherboard ASUS cm6850
I have windows 7 64bit as the pre-installed OS.
When running games, they will often detect my hardware and run at maximum graphics settings. For example, Fallout 4 defaults to Ultra settings at max resolution. When I actually play the game, it sometimes runs smoothly at 60fps without any problems for a while, and then drops to extremely low framerate randomly (maybe 1-2 fps). Once its performance drops like this, when I close it my computer continues to run slow as if it had just finished bootup. Just like with that, when I wait for a while and try again it functions well. I should note that it does not seem to depend on where I'm at in the game (exterior/interior cell, lots of buildings, etc) but instead seems to occur without warning.
Another strange thing is when running the game League of Legends, if I uncap the fps under it's options, it will jump to ~300 fps. However, when it does this, a strange buzzing sound is played through any audio I have (it's done this on 3 different headsets/earphones) and random white flickers will occur on the screen at random intervals (not constant).
Using a program to monitor my CPU/GPU temperatures, the temperatures seemed to be fine. It worried me anyways, so I simply capped the fps at 120 and the problem stopped. Sometimes when playing other games at high fps, the white flickers also occur.
All of my drivers are up to date, as well.
The only source for these problems that I can think of is that perhaps when I put in my graphics card I somehow did something wrong, but I'm not sure how I can be certain or what to do to fix it.
Does anyone know what might be causing these problems or how I can fix them?
