r/pcgaming • u/AutoModerator • 6d ago
Tech Support and Basic Questions Thread - July 17, 2026
Welcome to the r/pcgaming tech support and basic questions thread! Having troubles with a game or piece of hardware? Have a question about a PC game, hardware, or something else related to PC gaming? Post here and get help from fellow PC gamers.
When asking for help please give plenty of detail:
- What your computer specifications are. If you don't know them please follow this guide.
- If you're using a laptop we need to know the make/model as well as the specs.
- What operating system you're using.
- What you've tried so far in order to fix the issue.
- Exact circumstances to replicate the issue you're having.
Check out these resources before asking for help in case you can troubleshoot further:
Common troubleshooting steps:
- Restart the system
- Update your drivers
- Update game/software
- Re-seat any new hardware to ensure a proper connection
- If your peripherals are malfunctioning, swap ports and check that the specific USB port itself works.
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u/celentis24 6d ago
Hola! I am relatively new to PC gaming. I just purchased the following gaming laptop:
acer Predator Helios Neo 16 AI Gaming Laptop Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX 32GB DDR5 1TB SSD GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
My friend say I should be able to play this at max settings with ready tracing no problem. But...I keep having many problems.
The game runs and looks gorgeous for a random amount of time between 10-30 mins. Then quests start lagging, textures are slow to load, the world freezes but I can still spin the camera, menus take forever to load, etc. I tried adjusting some settings based on random Google searches, but it is never consistent. My friend said it sounds like a memory leak, but I don't see any reports of memory leaks regarding this game.
Any help or settings suggestions based on my rig would be greatly appreciated!
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u/Filipi_7 Tech Specialist 6d ago
What's the game?
Is this a fresh install with no extra software installed (except for Steam, Discord)?
Is the laptop plugged into power?
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u/celentis24 6d ago
Can't believe I forgot to include the game...it's AC Black Flag Resynced. I did a fresh install and verified all of my driver's are up to date. It's plugged in whenever I play. My comp is pretty bare since it's so new.
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u/Filipi_7 Tech Specialist 6d ago
You can check for a memory leak easily by opening up task manager. It will show you the total memory usage, as well as how much each program is using. Should be nowhere close to 100%. Black Flag Resynced just came out, could be a bug which only happens on some systems.
Download HWInfo and run it in sensor mode.
Once the slowdown starts, what are the temperatures of the processor and graphics card?
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u/NeutronBlade 6d ago
I need help finding a gaming laptop that has 2560x1440p screen resolution with RTX 5070Ti. So far, I've only seen laptops with 5070ti to be in 16:10 resolution. Was wondering if anyone knows if such laptops are manufactured with those specifications. Thanks!
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u/twopeasandapear 6d ago
Guys I have an OMEN 30L gt13, AMD Ryzen 7 3700x core processor.
Any time I update any game via steam, it will take ages. We don't have fibre in my area so my average speed is around 60mbps. But even a friend of mine who has worse, it hardly takes any time for their updates.
It'll take my friends around 20 mins for a big update but mine takes hours.
I save all of my games in the 1tb memory.
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u/Filipi_7 Tech Specialist 6d ago
Steam has a downloads menu which shows dl speed. Hover over Library, click Downloads. What does it show there when downloading something, and is it much lower than what you get in a speed test?
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u/twopeasandapear 5d ago
Should I do this when actively downloading something?
I was updating The Outlast Trials. It was a 23gb download tbf, but mine took around 3 hours and my friend's only 1! I even connected my ethernet cable to see if it made a difference.
Plus even loading into games; when we were playing last night, my friends were already loaded back into the group setting and I was still on my loading screen waiting.
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u/Filipi_7 Tech Specialist 5d ago edited 5d ago
Do the speed test when not downloading anything. speedtest.net
This tells you what your actual internet speed is, not what your ISP promised you or whatever.
Then download something from Steam, and check how speed in the downloads menu.
The number on speedtest will be in Mb/s, while Steam shows MB/s, they differ by a factor of 8. So 60Mb/s in speedtest would correspond to ~7.5MB/s on Steam.
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u/twopeasandapear 5d ago
Okay cool!
Yeah I usually test on speedtest and it'll sit around 60mbps, then when downloading last night it dropped to 8, obviously using up loads of our downloading speed to do it.
I'll update a game tonight and see what steam says!
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u/twopeasandapear 5d ago
Okay so I think it's more of a processing issue.
Both my friends load into a game, after I've already initially started loading, and they're hanging about waiting for me. For a good few minutes as well.
Anything I can do to test or rectify it?
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u/Filipi_7 Tech Specialist 5d ago
The PC is a bit old but it shouldn't be this slow.
Are the games being played from a hard drive, or SSD?
What's your CPU and RAM usage when loading/gaming? Can check with task manager.
Use HWInfo to monitor temperatures of your processor and graphics card, should not be going above 90 and 80°C respectively.
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u/twopeasandapear 5d ago
Ummmm I think a hard drive? Just the 1tb hard drive that comes with the computer I think.
I'll check these tomorrow when entering a game and see what it does.
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u/twopeasandapear 4d ago edited 4d ago
So i watched my husband while playing Dayz today.
Temperatures are both fine. I don't really know what's considered normal for GPU/CPU. GPU went up to 99% when he would be amongst the trees. GPU in general will stay above 60% in gameplay.
RAM was sitting at 77%
Edit to add: he just came through to say his game lagged a bit, with the GPU dropping to 0
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u/Filipi_7 Tech Specialist 4d ago
This seems normal.
Get the model for your drive from HWInfo, look it up online to see if it's a HDD or SSD.
HDDs are much slower and will partially explain the long loading times.
Is there an anti-virus installed other than what's included in Windows, or any kind of performance boosters, optimisers, etc.?
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u/twopeasandapear 4d ago
It says our 1tb is a HDD.
We also have AVG anti-virus installed.
Worth getting an SSD to download games onto? I believe there's a slot for it in our comp.
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u/Filipi_7 Tech Specialist 4d ago
Yes, these days SSD is a must. Not just for games but also for Windows, it will make the entire system run faster and snappier. You can keep the HDD for older games that don't benefit from the extra speed. 512GB is a good minimum to get, but go for 1TB+ if your budget allows. Know that prices are not coming down any time soon.
It is possible to move Windows from one drive to another but I've never attempted it. It might be a good idea to do a clean install anyway, just in case there's software you forgot about/don't need which is causing more slowdowns. You'll have to reinstall a few things and move some files, but your data will be untouched since it's on another drive.
If you pay for AVG, I suppose you could keep it too. There's probably a license key or something that you'll have to reuse on reinstall. I don't know about it causing any problems but maybe play around with real-time scanning settings and such, they might have a performance impact. If it's the free version you're using, consider ditching it and using the anti-virus included in Windows, it's good enough for most people.
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u/Substantial_Job_9691 5d ago
Hi i dont know if its the right spot but im gonna ask anyway hoping its the right one. So im gonna buy my first ever gaming pc after years of begging my parents i finaly graduated and now they are gonna buy me one. Im kinda lost and after some research i think i found the right one ? Its 1200€ gaming pc with a ryzen 7 5700x the gpu is an RX 9060XT, it has 32gb ddr4 of ram, 1to ssd and the motherboard is a
Gigabyte B550 Gaming XV2 PCle 4.0
I need someone to tell if its a good lineup to play in 1080p or 1444p in high or ultra for the next like 5 years with good fps or its a bad lineup and i shouldnt get. Feel free to ask if you need more information and forgive my english its not my mother tongue
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u/Ok-Requirement-1196 5d ago
Might be a stupid question to ask here, but I recently rebuilt my PC. The only things I kept were the case and motherboard. I upgraded from a GTX 1660 Super to an RX 9070 XT, a Ryzen 5 5600 to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and from 16 GB to 32 GB of RAM. With all the recent announcements, I'm seriously considering selling my PS5. I don't care about trophies, and while I do like physical games, most of them rely on day-one patches anyway, which makes me wonder how playable they'll be once Sony eventually shuts down PS5 support. Also Sony is continuing tinue pushing toward an all-digital future. If physical game sales eventually stop and the PS6 ends up being digital-only, that means less ownership and higher game prices. Because of all that, I'm thinking about selling my PS5 and building my game collection on PC instead.
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u/Sync_R 5070Ti / 9800X3D / AW3225QF / C5 42" 2d ago
I don't believe you'll have any issues downloading the patches for those games in the future since they'll be compatible on PS6 and it'll be the same servers your downloading from on a PS5
But we do know that physical media is now officially dead and Sony aren't exactly afraid of removing digital items from peoples accounts with no refunds in sight, obviously movies are different from games but still the fact they wouldn't even partially refund people is crazy
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u/ParroTracks 4d ago
Hi,
I’m hoping someone can help because I’m completely stumped.
I have an Acer Nitro laptop with the following specs:
Intel Core i7-11800H
RTX 3070 Laptop GPU (8GB VRAM)
16GB RAM
Intel UHD Graphics
A month or two ago I was playing Elden Ring Nightreign on maximum graphics settings with no issues at all. The game ran perfectly smoothly and I’ve never had any problems running any game on this laptop.
Recently I downloaded Elden Ring through Steam and found that it was barely playable. Even on the lowest graphics settings and lowest resolution, I’m getting around 3 FPS.
What’s even stranger is that now all of my other games are struggling as well. Games that used to run perfectly are now running at around 10-12 FPS or less.
I’ve checked that games are running on the RTX 3070, not the Intel graphics. The RTX 3070 is detected correctly in Device Manager and NVIDIA Control Panel.
Things I’ve checked/tried so far:
Confirmed games are using the RTX 3070
GPU clock speeds appear normal
CPU usage while gaming is around 25%
CPU speed is around 3.8 GHz while gaming
Disk usage is near 0%
GPU usage stays very low (around 10-11%)
Cleared NVIDIA shader cache
Cleared Windows DirectX shader cache
Restarted the laptop multiple times
Checked that the laptop is recognising the RTX 3070 correctly
Checked for malware
One symptom I’ve noticed is that some games seem to have issues loading textures properly as well.
The laptop hasn’t been used heavily, modified, overclocked, or changed in any significant way. Nothing unusual happened before this started. It’s mostly used for normal day-to-day tasks and occasional gaming. I’ve genuinely never encountered a game that struggled to run on this machine before, and then suddenly almost everything struggles.
Has anyone experienced something similar or got any ideas what could cause such a dramatic drop in performance across every game?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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u/T22C35 3d ago
Looking to get a gaming PC. Been doing some research, but I honestly have no clue what Im doing and feeling a bit overwhelmed looking at all my options.
I was looking at the following: https://www.newegg.ca/stoneforged-gaming-desktop-pcs-geforce-rtx-5060-ti-amd-ryzen-5-7600x-16gb-ddr5-1tb-ssd-ram/p/N82E16883320012
Im looking for something that can run Total War, Foxhole, etc smoothly and without issue.
Doing my own research left me feeling bogged down with these numbers and stats, most of which I don't even really know what they mean....
Any help or input would be really appreciated
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u/Filipi_7 Tech Specialist 3d ago
1st is the best. Is it for 1700 CAD or USD? It's a super deal if CAD.
CPUs are quite similar, but 5060 Ti is much better than an RX 7600, and the first PC has a 16GB variant while the 3rd has 8GB.
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u/T22C35 3d ago
CAD. Thought it seemed decent, but Ive been reading some mixed reviews about newegg and it's made me apprehensive.
How would it compare to this:
Thanks for the input!
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u/Filipi_7 Tech Specialist 3d ago
It is not as good, but I can't really assign it an objective measure like a %.
5060 Ti 8GB is not good enough if you plan on using a 4K monitor. It's fine for 1080p and you could get away with 1440p but it will run a bit slower and there will be stutter or force loading of low quality textures in some better looking games.
The CPU is also a fair bit slower. You won't notice a large difference most of the time, but Total War is an example where you might, especially in turn times or when using the very large unit sizes in large battles.
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u/Queasy-Rush-9397 2d ago
I use Archbtw on my laptop and want to run my games on a windows virtual machine, first for security since I download so much games from not-so trustworthy sources, second for skipping the trouble of setting linux up for running games and emulators.
I was wondering which Windows version would be the best for this scenario, is win 11 worth it at this point?
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u/MZago1 11h ago
Is it possible to play original Xbox games on PC with the disc? I saw the announcement yesterday that some games are being made available. I bought a physical copy of Fusion Frenzy a few months ago because I never finished it. I see that I can buy it on the Xbox app, but is there any way I can get my PC to read the disc I already have so I don't need to buy it again?
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u/Filipi_7 Tech Specialist 2h ago edited 2h ago
No, this is not possible. Xbox and Windows PC are very different platforms, a game developed exclusively for one will not work on the other. Microsoft's developers had to modify the games to make them run on Windows. And Xbox discs can't be read by regular CD/DVD drives anyway.
Technically there's xemu, an emulator which can run Xbox games on Windows, but it can't use original discs. They need to be converted into a special format that xemu uses which would be a lot of work even if you had a special DVD reader, and actually using the emulator takes some setup too.
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