Sims 3 freezing

Hi guys,

First of all, thanks a lot for the latest Stuff pack! The effort is appreciated

I kind of have a very annoying problem. The game tends to freeze while I'm playing.
There is no error, no crashes, nothing special.. it just freezes. The animation of for example water or trees swaying in the wind continues but the time and sims/animals etc. freeze. I can move my mouse but can't click on anything. This happens A LOT. It's like every 10-15 seconds or so my sim freezes for at least 10 seconds which makes playing very annoying. It also seems to happen in buy/build mode when I try to move around.
I'm quite sure it has nothing to do with my computer being too slow because it's brand new and it used to work like a dream with Sims 3 before all this started happening. Should I try removing cache files or is there another solution?

Thanks

I'm playing Appaloosa plains. Doesn't have anything to do with mods, I update them whenever a new patch/expansion comes out and haven't installed any new ones recently. I could look at CC. I'll take a look at that overwatch link, thanks! The problem stopped for about 20 mins and now it's back to where it was.. so strange.. Sometimes it works perfectly and a couple of minutes later it freezes nonstop.

EDIT: could it have something to do with the latest 1.29 patch? Because for some reason I vaguely remember it started around that time.