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E6600 - 1 core always busy?

demoneye

demoneye

demoneye

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Joined
15 Aug 2008
Posts
45
Hi,

My HTPC has a E6600 installed and it's left on 24/7.

After about 1 day of running, 1 of the cores shows as 90% busy all the time, but the task manager shows no applications running, and not processes running at high usage?

Process_Usage.jpg


If I reboot, it settles down again to virtually no usage, but again, builds up on 1 core.

Can anyone recommend any utilities that will show me what the core is up to and what's using it?
 
Big.Wayne said:
click on the [Processes] tab in task manager and you will see what's using the cpu :)
Click to expand...

Already done that as I said... There are none that would amount to such a high usage - and this is on 1 core only!

MooMoo444 said:
Maybe the fact that you're remote controlling it is using a lot of power :S?
Click to expand...

It's the same if I'm remote controlling it or not...

Hmmm - memory usage... I wonder if it's thrashing the disk - maybe something has a memory leak?
 
Processes...

Process_Usage2.jpg


As you can see - there's no way it should be constantly clocking 50%!

Yeah - remote viewing the machine "donald" - blame the wife, she named it! :P
 
I dont know which it is on that list giving you issues.. but you can try disabling then one-by-one and seeing if your cpu usage lowers. Obviously dont disable important processes like explorer, just the others. Will help you narrow it down.
 
Seems a bit strange? Maybe you should try actually sitting in front of the machine and seeing if the CPU useage isn't something to do with the remote viewing, other than that I'm not sure what it could be?
 
I had something similar once and it was down to a driver playing up.

Go into device manager and click on view, then show hidden devices. Does anything have an exclamation mark next to it.
 
Ok - sat in front the system now, and looks like it may be a voltage issue going into one of the cores. I've had to reboot for some Windows updates and now all is fine again.

I'm going to leave it running overnight and see how it perfoms tomorrow.

Can anyone recommend a tool that reports info about individual cores (voltage, multiplier, FSB, etc.) and not the processor as a whole?

Just ran CPUZ and it seems to flick between two states... Does this look right? (Bugger...)

cpuz.jpg
cpuz2.jpg
 
Last edited:
Phew... I thought I was really screwed... :)

OK - I'll have to wait for 1 core to start running solid again and then start looking at processes that may be causing it!
 
Processes can be hidden from task manager (rootkit/virus etc). Try downloading process explorer instead (google, its on microsoft technet, free download).

Its a bit more complex but it shows a lot more info, and its virus/rootkits dont normally bother to hide from it.
 
Corasik said:
Processes can be hidden from task manager (rootkit/virus etc). Try downloading process explorer instead ...
Click to expand...

I did, and (btw - great suggestion and great tool)... 50% was being given over to "hardware interupts"!!! Did a bit of research and seems to be pointing to driver issues with the HDD.

Uninstalled the default MS driver and rebooted, letting it reinstall the drivers again - problem disappeared... Time will tell if it reappears ;)
 
demoneye said:
I did, and (btw - great suggestion and great tool)... 50% was being given over to "hardware interupts"!!! Did a bit of research and seems to be pointing to driver issues with the HDD.

Uninstalled the default MS driver and rebooted, letting it reinstall the drivers again - problem disappeared... Time will tell if it reappears ;)
Click to expand...

My guess would be your hard drive had been switched by windows from DMA to PIO transfers. This can be caused by game / cd copy protection systems, but sometimes it can just "happen". If the problem comes back check to see what transfer mode your disks are using.
 
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