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GPU activity spikes

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Joined
26 May 2008
Posts
1,142
Hi all,

I'm just wondering if anyone has any advice on what I can do to see whats causing this?

My 7970's activity can randomly spike when just browsing the net / watching a youtube video.

The activity can spike to as much as 75% and then back down to 8% or so.

Any ideas what could be causing this?
 
Yeah just sitting at idle on desktop with MSI afterburner open ( to get the nice graph) and it spikes to 97% for some reason.

Edit: going to try going back to 13.1 Drivers just in case its that causing it
Nope still happening
 
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Weird, try having task manager open with all processes shown and ordered by CPU usage, see if a process goes up to the top when the GPU usage spikes.
 
Will do, just waiting for it to spike again. I'll post back with the results.

Nope its always .net Runtime Optimization Service even when spiking.

But when it spikes CPU usage is at 0%
 
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dude relax

happens all the time on my card, and happened for the other two 79xx cards i had previously. it started happening going from one 12.x driver to the next, and ever since then it's been there regardless of OS or anything else. this is just one of the hardware specific "problems" these drivers have, but it doesn't do anything bad.
 
dude relax

happens all the time on my card, and happened for the other two 79xx cards i had previously. it started happening going from one 12.x driver to the next, and ever since then it's been there regardless of OS or anything else. this is just one of the hardware specific "problems" these drivers have, but it doesn't do anything bad.

Ok cool :) just wanted to check just incase there was something wrong
 
yeah, i know the feeling. there are some bigger bugs in the catalyst drivers that have been around for months though so don't sweat if you find other problems too :p. enjoy your card!
 
ok so I've figured out how to reproduce the issue and its not good :(

if sitting on desktop with 0 other windows open, if i don't move the mouse for a few seconds I get 100% gpu usage with really high temps and fan usage. BUT as soon as I move the mouse my GPU usage plummets to 0 percent. as do my temps they fall slowly along with the fan speed. I stop moving the mouse for more than a few seconds and bam its back up to 100%.
 
oof. ok i can't reproduce your problem. do temps continue to rise for a significant length of time? does the clock speed/voltage go up?

what programs do you have open in task manager?

does event viewer report anything odd?

do you fully uninstall and driver clean between catalyst installs?

are your components overclocked?

i really haven't heard of this before but it might be good to just try and go through everything step by step to see if other hardware or software might be messing with your card.
 
oof. ok i can't reproduce your problem. do temps continue to rise for a significant length of time? does the clock speed/voltage go up?

what programs do you have open in task manager?

does event viewer report anything odd?

do you fully uninstall and driver clean between catalyst installs?

are your components overclocked?

Yeah its not very nice :(
temps get to about 80C+ when sitting on the desktop.
Event viewer doesn't have anything in it that I can tell related to the issue.
I've just done an uninstall of 13.2 beta 7 and about to install 13.1, removed the old drivers and then used driver sweeper.
Nothing is overclocked at all in the system
 
Ok done a fresh install of 13.1

And the issue disappears, funny that... I'm now getting an ieutil.exe error message. Which from doing some investigation appears it could be a bitcoin mining Trojan!

Yup it is

iehighutil.exe is a bitcoin miner.
 
the devious *******s... i did think you might have malware that was ramping up your gpu but i mostly thought "why the hell would malware do that". bitcoin mining makes sense :p

good to hear you got things sorted.
 
the devious *******s... i did think you might have malware that was ramping up your gpu but i mostly thought "why the hell would malware do that". bitcoin mining makes sense :p

good to hear you got things sorted.

Yeah ive read a few threads with this issue now, what AV do you use? I have AVAST its really good.

Last year i had AVAST and AVG running both at the same time for beter protection, just make sure you run 1 scan at a time and not both the same time.

The shields they have are both decent but AVAST is the best ive had so far even better then the paid ones :\
 
Just throwing this out there..i had been suffering with a random increase in gpu usage precedded witha brief flicker on my monitor..was driving me mad as it only happened occasionally...turned out to be winsat.exe kicking in and causing it..once disabled, problem stopped.
 
look in the c drive. Is there a temporary folder there? plus look at task manager is there something like iehighutil process running? if yes then you have this new bitcoin malware. Lod in safe mode and delete the temporary folder as well as disable the startup process in task manager


EDIT: should have read all the posts before posting lol
 
look in the c drive. Is there a temporary folder there? plus look at task manager is there something like iehighutil process running? if yes then you have this new bitcoin malware. Lod in safe mode and delete the temporary folder as well as disable the startup process in task manager


EDIT: should have read all the posts before posting lol

lol its cool, I'm just glad I got it sorted. Must be a new piece of malware as MSE or malware bytes didn't pick it up
 
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