MS Word/Chrome Youtube uses 100% of CPU?

[hughtrimble]

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

 

[hughtrimble]

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!

 

[hughtrimble]

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!

 

[hughtrimble]

Looks at price of CPU.

Yup, very much understood. But I was advised it would be enough for non-gaming home office use.

I run an i7-4770k for my gaming machine.

This one should, surely, be able to have YouTube and Word running?

 

[hughtrimble]

Have you got the latest gfx card driver installed?

No GPU installed, just the on-board graphics of the CPU.

 

[hughtrimble]

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%!

 

[hughtrimble]

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).

 

[hughtrimble]

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.

Currently it's not proving itself, but hopefully it's just a temporary Word/Chrome issue...!

 

[hughtrimble]

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

 

[hughtrimble]

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.

Thank you for this.

Yes, MS Word is increasingly looking like the culprit, rather than just Chrome/YT. Looking online, it appears others have had similar issues with Word 2013, but usually the problem's been traced to headers/footers from previous versions of Word in the 2013 document, or always exhibiting high CPU useage even when apparently doing nothing.

This one is odd in that it's 0% when I'm doing nothing in Word, but even just typing in a new, blank document the CPU useage rockets.

 

[hughtrimble]

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.

So bad that they can't handle basic multitasking, though?

 

[hughtrimble]

Look at post 6 on this thread.

Other people experiencing same issue.

Cheers ope - though I'm not getting 100% CPU with YouTube videos, just around 30%. It's the combination of Word and YouTube that's the killer. And it seems it's actually just Word that's the killer given it's riding 80-90% CPU just typing with only Word open!

So thank you all for your troubleshooting ideas and suggestions etc. Seems Word is the culprit! Now to solve that one...

 

[hughtrimble]

You could download Libre Office as an alternative. I use it exclusively on my PC.

Unfortunately that isn't an option - this is a machine for my parents, and they just wouldn't switch given both still use MS Office for work.

More likely to buy a hefty CPU I think. But this 80-90% CPU Word thing doesn't appear to be normal, so hopefully it can be fixed with some tweaking.

 

[hughtrimble]

Its a known problem for a while:

http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1183539-office-2013-high-cpu-spikes-in-windows-81/

Even people running CPUs like a Core i7 3770 are reporting it can cause problems!!

Crap. I'll see if I can get an older version of Word to run along with the rest of Office 2013. Or just whack them all up to 2016.

Thanks again.

 

[hughtrimble]

Tried re-installing it??

Did just this just now, and instead installed the 32 bit version rather than the 64 bit. Word now down below 10% CPU useage under heavy typing. So, excellent!



Would the switch from 64 to 32 really make that much of a difference? Or is it more likely the fresh install sorted things? (To be thorough I should have just redone 64 bit and tried, but I can't see them ever needing its 'features' vs the 32 bit)

 

[hughtrimble]

Probably just the reinstall sorted it, but yeh, there is little functional difference.

Cheers