Small freezes? Hiccups now and again?

[mikeo01]

Surely my power supply isn't failing, it is just over a year old, Corsair TX650w. Processor at stock 3.3 Ghz with 3.9 Ghz turbo core. Now and again the computer will do a small freeze then come back to life. This is true for some applications, such as the Internet, it decides not to scroll.

What could be the problem? Everything is under a year old so don't see why it would do this.
Could it be after some overclocks I did and some restarts?

Or could it be because I formatted my hard drive so many times?

[abaxas]

Check cpu temps first.

[mikeo01]

Temperatures are fine, reported 8-20 degrees idle. Load never goes above 50 (Prime95 100% load)

I use these for monitoring:
HWmonitor
PCProbe (ASUS)
AMD Overdrive

[Blastuk]

how often does it happen? Is it a possibility that your drives have spun down and it hiccups when it waits to spin back up?

[mikeo01]

Quite often, it does it when loading something large, like loading up a Battlefield 3 server. Mostly on the web and loading applications. Doesn't do it too often, but with a new-ish PC like mine it shouldn't do it at all you know.

[vinnyT]

Sounds to me like a hdd problem, try the self-diagnosing program on the drive manufacturers website (i.e. Seatools if it's a Seagate drive) and see if that flags any issues.

[mikeo01]

I did think it may be the HDD because it does make high pitched noises when reading and writing, which must be the headers screeching. There is no errors found using the Seagate tools, I used it not long ago, so no apparent hardware issue.

Could it be possible I have tilted the HDD some time and caused damage to the headers?

The HDD is only around 1-2 years old.

[shaithis]

Sounds like driver/software to me.

[Lee H]

Is speedstep enabled?

I had an issue with stuttering in games which I found was related to speedstep dropping the CPU down to 1.6 GHz and ramping back on the voltage.

As soon as I disabled this feature, the issue went away.

[mikeo01]

Thanks for everyones replies, it was speedstepping, my FX would go as low as 800 mhz and back up to 3330mhz. Once disabled its gone

Thanks everyone!