Random Frame Drops

Hello. I have noticed, lately, that when flying my FPS will go from 100+ down to 10 (for approx 5 seconds) and back to 100+. With this, there is a major decrease in my CPU speed (from 4.8GHz to 0.75 in some cases). This happens on all settings presets
Any suggestions?
Specs:
RTX3070
32GB RAM
i9-10850K @4.8GHz

100+ FPS? Are you running on ultra-low and 480p? I see it impossible to run the sim that high, I’ll say I have slightly better hardware than you and I get stable 40 FPS at 1440p.

I run at 1366x768. I use a very well optimized Ultra setting that has certain things turned down which dont affect quality and only affect performance

So you are cpu bound. Which means that when the sim maxes out the main cpu thread and cant keep up with feeding the GPU you will get stutters. These are unavoidable. While your framerates are high you will have more stutters. Most people aim to have a balanced system for this sim with the GPU being just at maximum load to ensure smoothness in most situations.

Old article using last gen hardware but the principle still applies.

Clearly, its not unavoidable. It was working just fine before.
At the moment my sim is unflyable, and with my specs that shouldn’t be the case.

Five seconds for any computer is like an eternity. A five second drop no matter the before and after is serious. Also, your CPU speed dropping so low is puzzling. It could be that your CPU speed dropping so low is causing the FPS drop no matter what the settings are in MSFS. And the CPU speed drop is hurting everything running on the computer, not just MSFS.

There may be cooling problems with your CPU and it is throttling back to protect itself from destruction. The heat sink cemented to the CPU may be separating. After 5 seconds, the CPU has cooled off enough to resume full power. The cooling problem might be in the PSU cutting back CPU voltage due to overheating.

According to your description, this sounds like a serious hardware problem that needs to be fixed quickly. This type of problem cannot be fixed by changing MSFS or Windows settings.