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Why is one core often running at 100%?

Tags:
  • Laptops
  • Core
  • Computers
  • Windows 8
Last response: in Windows 8
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December 2, 2013 5:28:40 AM

Lately, one core on my laptop has been running at 100%, slowing down the whole computer to a crawl. This started happening when I had Windows 7 installed, and doing it with a clean install of Windows 8.1. The laptop is a DV7 with i7 processor and 16GB ram. HDD is Seagate 500gb 7200rpm.

What could be causing this? It's not hardware, as Linux works fine, and never uses this much CPU. As of now, very few programs are installed on the laptop.

More about : core running 100

a b D Laptop
a b * Windows 8
December 2, 2013 5:34:50 AM

I've run into 100% CPU usage on a XP machine recently, it was a svchost.exe. You may want to see if you have a svchost.exe forcing the Core to 100%.
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December 2, 2013 8:06:22 PM

Possible solution - after further research, I believe the computer was overheating and throttling. It was set to the high performance power setting, running at a constant 2.8ghz, which is full turbo speed for the i7-720. I took the laptop apart and found the thermal paste for the CPU and GPU completely dried out. So I polished the heat sink surfaces to a near-mirror and used AS5. Idle temps dropped from 67*C to 45*C at 2.8ghz. I started using the balanced profile which has the cpu idling at 1.3ghz at 40*C. Let it idle for over 2 hours with the resource monitor running, and the cpu usage never went above 5% on any core.



I will update in a couple days. Also, mods may want to move this thread to hardware.
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