I guess my PSU could be responsible for the lower bench results. it's a 500w psu - which on paper should be just barely enough to support what I have. but it was one of the more solid PSUs around when I bought it, and the most expensive one in its class. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that PSU specs are kind of ambiguous, and most of the time a premium quality 500w will have more power output than a cheap 900w. But, with regards to the thread topic - this only helps to remove any possible blame from the SSD (which would make sense, because I haven't felt that the SSD has anything wrong with it - plus the other drive behaves the same way with fallout). I suspected windows to be the cause from the beginning, but the reason I made the thread was to see if there was a way to fix this problem that wasn't as severe as reinstalling windows. so, for now I think we can concede that my hardware probably isn't to blame for fallout's stutter. I'll be reinstalling windows as soon as I get my hands on the new motherboard - but I'd still like to track down where windows is (probably) failing. I mean, is it corrupt drivers? is it just an inevitable thing on months old windows installations?