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MS Word/Chrome Youtube uses 100% of CPU?

Soldato
Joined
22 Jan 2014
Posts
3,863
Evening all,

I recently put together a home office PC from the parts in this thread: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18716948

Whilst listening to YouTube on Chrome and typing in MS Word, I noticed the video stutters or stops completely, and the audio also stops and starts. Once I stop typing the video and audio resume unaffected. Both processes appear to be using a substantial amount of the CPU's processing power.

I've Googled around and have seen suggestions such as disabling the current spell checker, but this made no significant difference to the CPU usage of MS Word.

Any suggestions as to what might be the issue? Or is the AMD A4-5300 3.40GHz (Socket FM2) APU Trinity Dual Core Processor simply not capable of multitasking at that basic a level?

Your knowledge is, as always, greatly appreciated.

Hugh
 
I suspect you may be limited by your CPU.

Chrome uses insane amount of CPU for some reason. I have 2600k overclocked to 4.6gz and Chrome uses like 60% CPU when playing a video (twitch especially). It is weird and probably some kind of issue with the flash player but I have been lazy to investigate.
 
I suspect you may be limited by your CPU.

Chrome uses insane amount of CPU for some reason. I have 2600k overclocked to 4.6gz and Chrome uses like 60% CPU when playing a video (twitch especially). It is weird and probably some kind of issue with the flash player but I have been lazy to investigate.

I just tried with Edge (basically Internet Explorer) and the same issues arose with jolty video and audio whilst typing.

Drat!
 
Try disabling the GPU hardware acceleration in the options.

Is that 'hardware acceleration'? I did so for both MS Word and Chrome, and no noticeable change unfortunately.

This system doesn't have a GPU, just uses the on-board graphics of the CPU. Was suggested it wouldn't be needed for watching YouTube and using MS Office programmes...that may not be the case though!
 
you want hardware acceleration enabled, it offloads video decoding to the gpu/igpu.
what cpu usage do you get using ms word on its own and youtube on its own ?
 
I do have it enabled (also tried with disabled but no difference).

I went to the "secret" options as well of Chrome and played a bit with them but still no difference.

I suspect it may be related with some outdated/buggy version of flash that Chrome got integrated.
 
you want hardware acceleration enabled, it offloads video decoding to the gpu/igpu.
what cpu usage do you get using ms word on its own and youtube on its own ?

Chrome whilst doing nothing is 0%. Running a 720p video on YouTube, the app is listed as using around 6-8%, but in the background processes section it's 30%. Is it a case of combining these together to get the overall useage? I wish they'd just combine the two to show what Chrome is using, both as an app and in background processes.

Word whilst doing nothing is 0%. Typing quite rapidly, the app is listed as using 88%!
 
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Silly question, but is the CPU actually running at full speed. i.e. is it in a low power state because it feels that word/chrome aren't worthy of boosting to full clock speed.

Run up CPU-z whilst the stuttering is going on and check the clockspeeds.
 
You should be OK - the chip is more powerful than those AMD Jaguar based laptops and AM1 based PCs which people use for basic web browsing and word processing.
 
Having never used such a CPU, I really don't know it's performance. I would think that as a modern CPU it should be fairly capable, but then again for £27 I'm not surprised.

What OS are you running?
 
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Silly question, but is the CPU actually running at full speed. i.e. is it in a low power state because it feels that word/chrome aren't worthy of boosting to full clock speed.

Run up CPU-z whilst the stuttering is going on and check the clockspeeds.

Thank you for the suggestion - never used it before, so hopefully I'm interpreting things correctly - reading off the clocks of Core #0 (can't see the option for the second core):

With both Chrome YouTube and word running, it's basically hovering at 3590.14MHz, but dips down to 1396.14MHz and 2991.78MHz occasionally.

Each alone, it's running about the same, hovering at 3590.14MHz.

That seem correct? I've had a look in AMD Catalyst and it's running on Balanced power (can't seem to change that though).
 
Having never used such a CPU, I really don't know it's performance. I would think that as a modern CPU it should be fairly capable, but then again for £27 I'm not surprised.

What OS are you running?

It is very cheap yes (I've just seen that the price of the i7-4770k I purchased over two years ago has now gone up by the same amount this CPU is currently selling at!).

Windows 10
 
Chrome whilst doing nothing is 0%. Running a 720p video on YouTube, the app is listed as using around 6-8%, but in the background processes section it's 30%. Is it a case of combining these together to get the overall useage? I wish they'd just combine the two to show what Chrome is using, both as an app and in background processes.

Word whilst doing nothing is 0%. Typing quite rapidly, the app is listed as using 88%!

if its like FF it will be a seperate process doing the video. 30% sounds okay.

word using 88% does not seem right at all.
 
I'll sum up my experiences of Amd's past and current line of "APU's".

Total and utter waste of time and space, how AMD took the lackluster Piledriver and manage to take a such a stumble backwards i will never fathom.
 
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