and it turns out it wasn't the culprit all along. psu's not hot whatsoever and i'm still getting this problem. i guess that's a relief.
any other plausible causes that i could check?
edit: i have some pretty silly suspicion that msmpeng.exe (some shit for MSE) is causing it but i've done everything to it in my power to make sure it doesn't. so i dunno. my temps are fine for my cpu and gpu.
i don't fucking get what the problem could be. it's not just tf2 so i'm ruling that out. it's tf2 and bo2. haven't really noticed it in any other game but i would be completely surprised if it was only those two games. my computer's insides are also as clean as i can possibly make them right now as well.