theres nothing running that should interfere with the game that i can think of, not using any overlays, even tried disabling my antivirus (panda) and closing DisplayFusion (multimonitor goodness) but it did not change anything, all windows services that i dont need are disabled, using a selective boot with only the autoruns/services that are really needed, powersaving is on high-performance, everything is updated, BIOS properly set up, no conflicting drivers, cores unparked, so things should be good on that end will go over the guide again and let you know if anything changed :) thanks so far for all the help!