PC builds

Periodic stuttering

I faced this when using an AMD B450 Tomahawk Max motherboard. Every 15 seconds or so my system would freeze for about 500ms, during which even the cursor would be unresponsive. The freezing wouldn’t occur if I were playing a game, only when the system was relatively idle, like when web browsing. This seemed to indicate some sort of power optimization during idle loads. Indeed, the solution for me was to disable AMD’s Cool’n’Quiet feature in the BIOS. This feature scales CPU frequencies dynamically based on load.

During my research I found others with what they described as stuttering issues. Here are some of the solutions suggested:

• Disable AMD Cool’n’Quiet - This one worked for me
• Disable fTPM.
• Use Windows SATA device drivers instead of AMD ones
• Update BIOS

[AMD] Enable virtualization in BIOS

The setting for virtualization in AMD BIOSes is called “SVM”. SVM stands for Secure Virtual Machine. On the B450 Tomahawk Max this can be found in OC > CPU Features > AMD SVM Mode. Virtualization needs to be enabled for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).