ASUS N56VZ - Laptop stutters, hangs, freezes when playing games

I've had my ASUS N56VZ-ES71 for almost a year now. Before the game crashed when playing graphically intensive games for long periods of time (e.g.: it would not last beyond an hour of Civilization 5). Now it doesn't crash so much as it does hang/stutter/freeze during gameplay. It's always temporary, and it has yet to make a game actually crash. The screen freezes and I get this weird static noise from the speaker until it resumes back to normal. If it helps, I recently installed Windows 8.1 to a clean SSD. I've obviously googled the problem, but no solution has yet helped me. If anyone can even point me in the right direction, I would be so grateful. I really like this laptop, and this issue is really becoming annoying.

Edit: I think I figured out my own problem. My original 5200 RPM HDD is where I store my games and data (my SSD is small in side). The led for the HDD would goes solid blue (meaning it was being used) whenever the "micro-stutters" happened. I'm not sure how I can repair this but I am pretty sure this is the cause for the freezing.

 

If your games are stored on the HDD then likely that's what's causing the lag. There's probably a point where the game is requiring a fair amount of data to be processed, which if it's running off of a 5200 RPM drive and your OS is on the SSD, then it's liable to cause hangups or stuttering while it plays catch up.

 

Is there any solution to this? Do I need to buy a faster HDD to replace my 5200rpm one?

 

You can run a defrag on the HDD to see if that helps any. If you have an external hard drive to save those files onto you can do so then format that drive which is nice to do on HDD at least once a year.

 

Change the drive out to at least a 7200RPM and it will help to reduce the stuttering symptom.