HD 3650 and CPU usage

[PPB]

Hey all,

I used to have an old ATi X800 card. A couple of weeks ago, it died on me. I'm not much of a gamer (really casual, mostly old games) so I just went and got something that fit with my power supply.

It ended up being an HD 3650 again from ATi. The card would be great if it weren't for the fact that it seems to completely clog my CPU. I get 30-40% at idle, and it goes even higher when I use basic applications (firefox, etc.). Even the mouse "lags" sometimes. The booting time of the PC has also increased a good tenfold. I'm not really tech savy, and I don't really understand what is going on. Is this considered normal for a card of this calibre (which doesn't strike me as being very high to start with)? Could it be a problem with the drivers? I tried uninstalling/reinstalling (using the latest from the ATi website instead of the ones off the provided CD) to no avail. I'm positive that viruses/trojans can't be causing this, since it was fine with the old card.

I guess my computer can be considered a dinosaur by today's standards, but here goes:
WinXP
P4 3.6 GHz
2 GB RAM

Any thoughts?

 

[dagger]

No, it's not normal. Open task manager, processes tab, and see what is causing the cpu load.

 

[PPB]

Looking at the task manager at idle, System Idle Process is at 99. I have 40 processes running, and a CPU usage hovering around 35%.

So it seems like the Idle Process is somehow taking up all that usage...?

Edit: I just did a minimal safe boot, and the CPU usage drops to 0. I don't know if this will make any sense, but what I conclude is that under a normal boot, something makes System Idle Process work harder than it should. I'm a bit at a loss.

 

[dagger]

That doesn't seem right, system idle process is unused amount. If it's 99, how can the cpu load be 35%?

 

[PPB]

Upon booting it this morning... it's fine. I'm back to 0-2% at idle. I just don't know what happened the other days though. I think it's very fishy, and I get the feeling that it will happen again unless I track down the original problem.

Anyway, thanks for the replies. I'll keep my fingers crossed from now on.