Slight stuttering during gaming

This happened when I had a 6850 and I assumed it was just because my graphics card was kinda dated but I noticed the same thing happens on my new GTX 970. In some games I have never noticed it happen at all (ex. BF4, Total War), in other games it happens a low or moderate amount (CoH2, Insurgency, Red Orchestra 2), and in GTA5 it happens the most. Basically what happens is the game is running super smoothly, then for seemingly no reason, nothing graphically intense happening, the game just pauses very briefly and resumes as normal. Sometimes this pause is less than half a second, other times it can hang up for nearly 2 seconds (coh2 being the worst offender for duration), either way its noticable and even though its not gamebreaking it just gets annoying.

I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with graphics cards since BF4 and Total War on extreme settings have no problem at all even though they look a lot better than some of the other games it happens in. So I guess that would mean CPU or memory is causing this? My specs are i5 4430, Gskill Ripjaws 8gb RAM, and just some fairly standard 72000rpm hard drive Seagate I believe. My gut feeling is I need a better hard drive. My CPU is good enough, right? Is there some control panel setting I can tweak to get rid of the hiccups?

Whoops, thought it was only about COH2.

I experience the same thing... Not sure what's doing it. I have a pretty decent solid state drive with COH2 installed so I don't think it's the hard drive.

I do have G Skill Ripjaws for RAM as well which is interesting, though I have 16gb. Coincidence?

I experience the same thing... Not sure what's doing it. I have a pretty decent solid state drive with COH2 installed so I don't think it's the hard drive.

I do have G Skill Ripjaws for RAM as well which is interesting, though I have 16gb. Coincidence?

I tried testing this for the past hour and I think it is just lag spikes from bad online connections. Switched GTA from GTA online where it was having mini freezes left and right to offline play and not a single one in 30 minutes. I thought it was a hardware issue bc that never really happens when I'm playing console games but maybe its just because theres a lot more international play on PC.

8 gb of RAM isn't even close to enough for this game if you're playing this on high settings, the most i've seen this game use my RAM was around 11 gbs

8 gb of RAM isn't even close to enough for this game if you're playing this on high settings, the most i've seen this game use my RAM was around 11 gbs

Wut. That's too much man

8 gb of RAM isn't even close to enough for this game if you're playing this on high settings, the most i've seen this game use my RAM was around 11 gbs

I'm fully maxed out on this game whilst streaming in 1080p at 3000kbps on 8Gb RAM... it's fine for me

Show Spoiler

Your computer is ok, its the game fault actually, people reported it happening since recent patches.

Yes, its just COH2. People with 980 Ti's and 6 cores with 32GB of memory experience the same lags and stutters.

Your cpu is OK ( a little low-end for my taste, but good enough for gaming)

HDD doesn't effect game performance. 7200 rpm is fine.

Your ram is a little low, but coh2 doesn't like ram anyway.

GPU is good.

If you are going to upgrade? Start with your ram first.

Restart game when stuttering happens

PC seems fine.