1 Core 99% Usage

[TheSkateyBird]

Hey,

So I jumped in on the recent 7950 Twin Frozr refurbs deal on Overclockers and I'm really impressed with the graphics improvement however I've been noticing some big frame drops from around 60fps down to 25-30fps.

I installed MSI afterburner and enable the OSD features and I saw that Core 4 of my Phenom II X4 955BE was running at between 95%-99% usage and the other cores were barely being touched. This was happening while playing Tomb Raider, Skyrim and The Witcher 2.

Is this a problem with my processor/MB or is it just as the processor is now over 5 years old and cant keep up with the stonking graphics card?

Cheers.

 

[TheSkateyBird]

The BIOS is up to date and my processor is OC'd to 4Ghz. Testing out a few more games and it's the same story.

 

[TheSkateyBird]

I did a clean windows install about 4 weeks ago when my SSD died. As for old GPU drivers, I went into device manager and right clicked uninstall.

 

[TheSkateyBird]

Right, uninstalled CCC, rebooted into safe mode and used driver sweeper and reinstalled 7950 drivers. Seeing little difference in performance, still maxing out core 4.

I tried running Borderlands 2 and it was the same, decided to enable Vsync to see if that would fix anything and I'm now seeing a more even load distribution, between 60-80% across all cores, but that doesn't make sense to me?

 

[TheSkateyBird]

Tried this out in the Witcher 2 and Tomb Raider to no effect, looking like it's turning out to be just a cpu bottleneck issue.

 

[TheSkateyBird]

@Mad Matty

I have recently downloaded the AMD Omega drivers for the 700 southbridge chipset, how would I go about rolling it back? As far as I'm aware it got removed when I removed all features of CCC yesterday.

@Davedreee

The CPU usage in task manager shows the same usage as the graphs in task manager.

@tricknickyuk

I've had a go using the Core Unpark utility and it's yielded some results, for example in Borderlands 2 it's still showing that core 4 is at 90+% but the frame rate isn't randomly tanking anymore. Will test further.

 

[TheSkateyBird]

Just rolled back the drivers, didn't have any previous installed so it's reverted to the default Windows 2006 drivers for now. Although I can confirm that performance has shot up and the cores are now equally loaded.

Thanks a lot!

 

[TheSkateyBird]

Well I've had a session of Borderlands 2 and the typical core usage has been around 80%-95% across all cores and around 80% on the 7950.

The Witcher 2 is showing between 70% and 80% across the cpu cores and maxing out the gpu core.

Fallout New Vegas

60-70% on two cores 40-50% on the others and 60% on the gpu.

Sound about right?

 

[TheSkateyBird]

I've got little experience with overclocking, the core speed was simple enough, multiplier and a small voltage boost. Is ocing the northbridge a similar affair?

Results are all at 1080p with v-sync off, ultra settings. Seeing at least 50+ fps in most games rarely dropping below 40 which I'm really happy with.