High idle and 100% cpu usage during gaming

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bartsarzy

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Sep 20, 2010
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My current setup has 6700k and gtx 1080 which for the longest time has performed flawlessly with both a cpu and gpu overclock but recently, I've had some massive issues playing any game and just high cpu usage at idle. During gaming, whether is COD WW2, Wildlands, Rocket League, Fallout 4 to name a few, my cpu sits in the upper 90% of usage with it quite often sitting at 100%. My games will hang and become unplayable. It should never ever be this high. In basic usage of the system, I'm anywhere between 10%-25% usage with nothing open except NZXT CAM. I even have trouble with CAD programs freezing. I should state to, my temps are fine. I idle in the high 20c to low 30c and while gaming I have a gpu that never really passes mid 40c and cpu in the mid 50c.

If I look in the task manager, I see that the Windows Management Instrumentation is using the most CPU. I looked in the event viewer for a log of that service and it just showed some errors pertaining to a SATA AHCI controller hardware ID that I couldn't really investigate much because it's bundled with the mobo and drivers for it do not exist except the Microsoft obtained ones. I would've assumed they would be bundled with the Intel chipset driver but nope.

I'm really at loss here though as to what is causing this high CPU usage. With it, my computer is useless to game on and work on other stuff.
 
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jerrylee22

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For Windows 10 (or lower), you can try running Process Explorer by Microsoft, it can sometimes show a more comprehensive view of what's running (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer)

Consider what you're using to overclock and confirm the GPU and CPU are running at their specified speeds. When I overclocked my CPU with Intel Extreme Tuning Utility, it worked flawlessly for a while but randomly stopped working. Temporarily resetting them to stock speeds and seeing how everything runs is the best way to determine whether or not the OC became unstable.

I'm assuming you've tried restarting the system and cleaning up redundant/unnecessary startup programs and determined that something new that you recently installed wasn't causing the slow down.

Other than that, any problems that occur overtime on your system could very well be caused by a virus/malware. Even if you already have Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware, not every program can detect every infection and it's probably best to have two if you don't, like perhaps Malwarebytes and Bitdefender (just examples).
 
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bartsarzy

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Thanks! I'll definitely check that out! I did my overclocking through the bios. I'll probably try resetting my overclock, I've even thought about reflashing the bios. Although that's most likely not going to fix it, at least I'd cover that end. I have restarted, and cleared as much as I could using CCleaner and the built in windows cleaner. The only "new program" to my knowledge was an update to CAM but through the task manager, it only seems to use less than a 0.5% of cpu, more when it starts, when in use. Whether that's correct or not, I have no idea, but overall imo it's a very well developed piece of software.

I have also ran scans too. I use windows defender combined with the premium version of malwarebytes with all drives checked as well as a rootkit scan and ran one time scans with herdProtect, Hitman Pro and msert all of which returned with nothing found.


 
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jerrylee22

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Since WMI in Task Manager is using a lot of CPU and there were some errors pertaining to SATA. There are some similar posts to this I'm guessing you may have found? Not sure if they'll end up being relevant to you:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-other_settings/wmi-provider-host-high-cpu-usage-and-laptop/44cb3953-a883-404a-a94f-ee4f363d3a4b?page=2
https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge/wmi-provider-host-high-cpu-usage-on-windows-10-solved/
https://www.drivethelife.com/windows-10/wmi-provider-host-high-cpu-usage-windows-10-creators-update.html

Sometimes, too, programs that are/aren't Malware can use other processes and not register with high usage. Usually Malwarebytes or similar malware solutions detect PUP/PUAs, which can hog on resources.

It probably wouldn't hurt to check your SATA and power connections on your drives if you haven't, but I don't think that would fix your problems. You can use a program like CrystalDiskMark to check your read and write speeds and compare them with your expected specifications for your drive to see if it's encountering any errors.

Otherwise, I'd look into the specifics pertaining to that SATA AHCI error with WMI.
I'm sorry I'm not an expert on this, but ultimately unless you can fix it otherwise, it could have to do with a communication error between your OS and/or the drive it's on and the motherboard BIOS.

Another thing is a setting in your BIOS may have changed. I'm not sure how, but there was one time with my old system that it randomly changed it's boot mode and I was encountering some errors.

It's also possible that an external data backup followed by a restore point could repair issues with your system if you haven't tried that yet. Last resort here, but with Windows 10, using the media installation tool via Disc/USB, you can do a full system reinstall with the option to keep data (I had to use this once and it fixed my issues).
 
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