HELP CPU usage up to 100%??!!?

typhuss

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Hi there. I'm a gamer in need of help.

During games the CPU suddenly jumps to 80%-100% usage and in consequence slows down the game to an unplayable level. There is another qwirk which is that suddenly the image freezes for about 5 to 10 seconds (just before I can get the long thought after frag, which then instead frags me o_O ...).

My system:
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3000+
Motherboard: Asus A7V8X
GPU: GeForce FX 5900
Ram: 2*512 Ram (Corsair)

I have been told to check for spyware, which I have done. I have been asked if my drivers where up to date, which they are. I'm quite desperate to find a solution for these problems as I spend a lot of money for my system explicitely for gaming.

please if you have any suggestions or indeed solutions...I need help!!


thx in advance for your help

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by typhuss on 07/17/04 02:39 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
 

typhuss

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CPU:
Name AMD Athlon XP
Code name Barton
Specification AMD Athlon(TM) XP 3000+
Family/Model/Stepping 6A0
Extended Family/Model 7/A
Package Socket A
Clock Speed 2166.4 MHz
Clock multiplier x13.0

Chipset:
Northbridge VIA KT400 (VT8377) rev. 0
Southbridge VIA VT8235 rev. 0
AGP Revision 3.5
AGP Transfert Rate 8x
AGP SBA supported, enabled
AGP Aperture 64 MBytes
Memory Type DDR
Memory Size 1024 MBytes
Memory Frequency 166.6 MHz (1:1)
DRAM Interleave 4-way
CAS# 2.5
RAS# to CAS# 3
RAS# Precharge 3
Cycle Time (tRAS) 7

2x
Memory type DDR-SDRAM
Manufacturer Corsair
Size 512 MBytes
Max bandwidth PC2700 (166 MHz)
Timings table
Frequency (MHz) 133 166
CAS# 2.0 2.5
RAS# to CAS# delay 3 3
RAS# Precharge 3 3
TRAS# 6 7
 

evulboo

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ive had the same problem but it was a spyware and 1 proggie didnt find it so i now use cwshredder, adaware and spybot between the 3 they find most of ur problems if u keep them upto date

If u do things right.... People won't be sure you've done anything at all......
 

typhuss

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ok i'll try removing any spyware again... though this problem was there even after formating the system...
i also want to flash my bios, but that looks a bit tricky.
i am using asus's 4in1 drivers, but have been told to use nforce drivers by users of another board. is this compatible or indeed necesary?
 

DonnieDarko

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Try looking through your registry and startup items. Check msconfig. Alot of times spyware removal programs wiln't find them. Sometimes you have to remove them yourself.

AMD64 2800+
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SoDNighthawk

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Your Motherboard is not a bad board however it is very limited in running overclock settings, this being the case I can tell it is causing your graphics card and CPU slow downs on the hardware side even running at stock speeds.

I used to own a A7V8X and in fact my wife's computer with an XP2800+ still uses it.

Ok down to business!! All games use 100% CPU usage they have for some time now it's just how it works to keep it simple.

If you are looking for that frag in online games then the problem with the computer freezing is a bandwidth problem and partly because the A7V8X motherboard you have has 2 drawbacks.

The first problem is that it is 8X AGP BUSS and that would be great if we were all still using graphics cards with less then 128MB at 8X AGP but your card is faster then the A7V8X can handle when matched with a Cable or DSL online connection.

Here is what is happening to you.

When your online for various reasons the connection PINGS in game fluctuate up and down and this causes extra stress on the CPU to keep up with your bandwidth, combined with the AGP high end graphics card you have Hogging the AGP buss for Bandwidth your system is actually drowning it's self.

Solution.

You need to get your bandwidth speeds down on your internet connection. try setting your NIC card Network or onboard LAN to a lower connection speed like Full 10 Duplex. Your NIC is proly default set to Full Autonegotion allowing all your bandwidth to constantly slam into the CPU.

The second thing you can do is to Purchase a A7N8X Deluxe ver2.0 Motherboard the prices are well under $80.00 Can so lower in the U.S I am sure.
This board has 2 built in Network devices one is the 3COM standard Internet LAN or Network card this is a good RJ45 connection but not as well planned out for gamers as the BUILT IN Nvidia nForce MCP Networking RJ45 connection. With the Nvidia NIC or network card you have the option to set the driver to 2 setting one is All available bandwidth and the other OPTION lets you set the NIC to CPU man that is very nice and thought of I am sure by Nvidia for the gamers out there.

Setting the NIC card to CPU only allows enough bandwidth to keep your connection stable and fast as your CPU or lets encompass the whole computer by saying the connection speeds can no longer drown out the computers bandwidth allowing the AGP buss and CPU to communicate without getting drowned out by resource hungry connection packets.

Using the CPU load level choke on the Network card will prevent those computer freezes in game. The freeze happens when the CPU and AGP buss grab a breath trying to compute all the DATA and from your end it looks like a freeze of the game screen. In computer time anything that we can see that takes that long is an ICE-AGE event within the computer. Not good for the computer or hardware at all.

Your current RAM and Graphics card as well as your CPU will transplant very nicely into the new A7N8X Deluxe ver2.0 Motherboard.

Now if you are only gamming at home and not online unlikely since you said you were hunting for possible Trojan and viruses you will still get game freezes with the AGP Buss of the A7V8X motherboard and the XP3000+ Cpu that would be much better off in the A7N8X Deluxe ver2.0 Motherboard. I still use the A7V8X in my wife's computer but she only has a XP2800+ and it is running at 200MHz Memory speeds and a CPU speed of 2.0 just under 2.1 MHz.

If you are using the Steam Network to online game get used to Viruses Trojans and Bogus Registry keys as well as server side or hacker modified config folders. Hackers hack good players right through the game server right through the Steam Network.

Get a good fire wall set it to the Highest level this can also cause split second game freezing.............Now get your self a good IP scanner like COMMVIEW when you are in a game in Steam hit the windows key and go to the desktop and open COMMVIEW \Start it and watch the IP's that come in if you got your fire wall set-up correctly you should see a couple IP's from your ISP and ONE IP from the game server you are on.
The trick here is to see if a hacker is trying to mess up your connection times or hack into your computer when you are in game. Look at the game server IP number you are on if it has one port, Example [27015] and just that port you are ok but if you see that port, Example 27015,137,344 <---With 2 known Trojan ports or any other port hanging off the back of the server port you can bet your last Beer that some connectivity hacker is trying to access your computer piggybacking over the server IP number.

Make a fire wall rule allowing the Server IP on port 27015 this will allow you to play on that Server IP under that port. Now make another fire wall rule and this one is important and never thought of. Make a new rule Denying that Server IP but only for ports 137,344. What this does is it will block that Server IP but only on the ports specified in the example, or whatever port you see hiding behind the real server port.

I have used this for some time now and server in the game list that I ping at 80 ping then I go into the game fluctuate between 80 and 4 or 500 ping I use this approach to blocking the tag-on ports then my pings drop back to 80 ping and stay there.

I believe many Admin's online use third party chat in the games to watch and talk to each other so the regular players cant hear them like Roger Wilco or MSN but I also know connectivity hackers do the same thing accept to cause harm.

Barton 3200+ 400MHz
A7N8X Deluxe
Air Cooled 45C
2x512 Corsair DDR 400 PC3200
GeForce FX5900
Two Maxtor 40Gig 8MB cach 7200rpm
SONY RW 52x/24x/52x
SONY DVD 16x/40x
 

typhuss

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that is finally my long looked for answer. THANK YOU SoDNighthawk.

this idea of problems with the mobo had in fact crossed my mind but I put it off imagining this couldn't actually cause me so much trouble...

i tried all sorts of programs to remove spyware/trojans/viruses etc which worked fine (still have the other problems though :). now i'm trying to get regrun to handle cftmon.exe and to stop popping up on every startup telling me to accept the deletion of that f###ing value.

anyway thx a bundle

---a happy gamer---
 

SoDNighthawk

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You have to consider that most of the problems you are having and things I have learned to overcome even as a computer tech and home user is.........The problems we see and have are hacker related at the basic to malicious levels especially if you online game.

They do not want to be very helpful in explaining what the problems are or how to fix them so you get the 24/7 run around. As you can see if you goggle search problems you end up on foreign language sites and sites that need to be logged into for tech support or you get the guy that asks his friend in a chat room how to perform cold fusion and his friend offers banana popsicles in a microwave.

However as I have worked as a computer tech in the past for some time it has been my job to correct these problems and have learned how to at least cope with them. I always try even if I fail to give the most correct solutions to problems I have read about or experienced first hand and solved.

The hackers always will have the upper hand it is so much easier to destroy then to create.

Another thing you can do and I am adding this post to one I just lost as Tom's is running so very slow..........

Goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE using the regedit command in the Start/run box. Goto the Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run & RunOnce and the RunOnceEX registry keys in there you can right click and remove the registry key that starts certain programs you DO NOT want to start with the computer.

For example my Digital Camera has a Camera Dock and a Browse to the Web Folder Icon. Well I use the Camera Dock to plug the camera into to download my pictures into the P.C but I never publish my personnel pictures to the internet so I deleted the key that starts the share to the web picture part of on HP camera software.
The only way I can shut that part of the software from starting with windows because looking at the software install any place else in the computer it is a bundle and you cannot shut the Web-Part off.

Knowing how to tweak your registry is the greatest thing since sliced bread. If your not sure what something is do a Google search on it and hope you get an explanation in most cases you do then you can make an informed decision on deleting a registry key or not.

Barton 3200+ 400MHz
A7N8X Deluxe
Air Cooled 45C
2x512 Corsair DDR 400 PC3200
GeForce FX5900
Two Maxtor 40Gig 8MB cach 7200rpm
SONY RW 52x/24x/52x
SONY DVD 16x/40x
 

phial

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do you really think you can troubleshoot his issue from the details he gave? oh and btw your so off the mark its not even funny, theres no way in bloody hell a nic can flood a CPU with data so it chokes, perhaps if you had gigabit lan it might saturate the pci bus if you are doing tons of stuff at once ... but the amount of data that comes through network connections is tiny compared to the massive data a cpu can actually pass through.. and it certainly doesnt even touch the agp bus which is something different altogether again roflmao!


were talking a broadband connection here, just a few megabit at most . he needs to clean his PC, or upgrade his drivers which are thigns you already suddgested

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phial

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OR, connect to a server where his ping doesnt suck. hah

ive seen counter strike do some wierd ass things when your ping goes over 300ms

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endyen

Splendid
Just go into the start menu (in "run" type msconfig, then click on the startup tab) and unclick msn messenger.
While you are there unclick everything else, and get a major performance boost.
 

phial

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yea msconfig is much safer than doing it manually via registry editing..

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typhuss

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I already tried that... have the newest drivers, unchecked msn messenger. the problem even stayed after formatting the damn machine.

could you perhaps tell me if the other part concerning the mobo is right...

I'm not a technician and NIC and such things are unknown territory for me. I try to make some sense out of them and SoDNighthawks answer looks promising...
 

phial

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yes but you see SodNightHawk does that, he ties things together that sounds similar but in reality they have very little connection to eachother, and altho his post seems to make sense in lamens terms he really doesnt know how it works and trust me its not accurate at all


a NIC is a network card. the problem you describe could be alot of things, and "freezing" or "lag" doenst tell us whats happening. those terms are misused ALL the time.. it could be something in your bios where your AGP aperature is too low and causing the pausing (unlikely) .. it could be a hardware conflict (doesnt mean a hardware failure), could be irq's... dude it could be SO MANY THINGS that its impossible for me to say anything, and yea that makes me look like a dumbass for flaming SoD . lemme think about it, ill try to think what it could be. post any info you can think of

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phial

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what motherboard drivers are you using?

which version of directx?

which video card drivers?

which sound card drivers?

what processes are running in the background?

when the game freezes for 5 seconds, what else is happening? is the hard drive light coming on? can you alt-tab out of the game , or is your system completely frozen and then jerks back to life?

anything like this will help

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typhuss

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all drivers are the latest available on the respective pages.

mobo driver:
VIA 4 in 1 driver Package Service v4.49

bios:
A7V8X BIOS 1014

directx:
9.0b

video card driver:
nvidia's 56.72

sound is onboard

when the game freezes I can't do anything except wait for it to jerk back to life. while freezing, the sound goes on or repeats itself, stoping for a moment just before the system gets back to normal state.
when everything slows down i can get out by either alt-tab, windows-key or ctrl-alt-del. as soon as i do this everything is back to normal on the desktop...

is there a way to get a printout of the processes running or do I have to write them down manually into notepad or something?
 
Also, games do not necessarily use 100% of your CPU. If this was the case, all games would freeze completely until more CPU cycles became available. Also, people would not be able to run 2 instances of EverQuest on the same computer.

<font color=red> If you design software that is fool-proof, only a fool will want to use it. </font color=red>
 

typhuss

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I stumbled onto a poll concerning SoD's ability to help people out of problems... :eek: and I now have certain doubts about his advice.

so my problem hasn't actually to do with my mobo? or could he be right on that one...?
wouldn't want to buy new stuff if my current system is alright...(which it isn't or else I wouldn't be here asking stupid questions :tongue: )

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by typhuss on 07/19/04 10:37 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
 
The first problem is that it is 8X AGP BUSS and that would be great if we were all still using graphics cards with less then 128MB at 8X AGP but your card is faster then the A7V8X can handle when matched with a Cable or DSL online connection.

Video cards can't even fully utilize the bandwidth of a <b>4x</b> AGP slot, let alone an 8x. I'm sorry SoD, but if you're going to provide information, please make sure it's accurate. I've called you on your BS before... and will continue to do so for as long as you keep posting it.

Yes, SoD uses a lot of technical jargon and at face value, it appears he knows what he's talking about. However, a little research soon shows his 'advice' for what it really is... FUD. We're talking about a person who claims his success in online FPS is 100% due to the CPU he chooses to use in his system.

<font color=red> If you design software that is fool-proof, only a fool will want to use it. </font color=red>
 

oolceeoo

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I suspect that your onboard sound COULD be the culprit, what games are you playing when this happens?

Although I am not aware about the quality of the VIA chipsets onboard sound quality, you said that when it freezes the sound repeats. It could be your onboard sound is eating away mass cpu cycles rendering the sound. Maybe could be a conflict with the onboard sound. Do you use a lot of onboard devices? What wattage is your PSU rated?

Have you updated your onboard sound drivers?

Have you recently added any hardware or software to your computer?

Did you check Device Manager and see if there are any conflicts?

P4C 3.0ghz
Asus P4C800E-D
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typhuss

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Device manager tells me everything is okay. The onboard sound drivers should be updated automatically via VIA's 4in1 driver package. I have been installing new software regularly, but the problem exists since some time and I am quite sure it has to do with my hardware. I was hunting for viruses etc because it was strongly suggested by another board I used, and this didn't realy improve performance a lot (I got rid of some spyware though :tongue: ).

The sound device is the only onboard device I'm using.

My PC does these things with nearly all games online and offline (except the OLD ones).

I have no idea what the wattage rate of my PSU? is???

I'll deactivate the sound device and see if I still get these freezes... would that, by any chance, tell me if it was related?



<font color=red>Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most</font color=red>
 

endyen

Splendid
What fsb are you running at? If that is a newer xp3000+ (200 fsb), your board does not support it. If it's a 166 fsb chip, try running it at 155.
You might also want to raise your agp aperture to 128.
 

typhuss

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How can I check at what FSB I'm running?
How can I change it (the case being) to 155?
How can I change my agp aperture and what does it do?



<font color=red>Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most</font color=red>
 

SoDNighthawk

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Using your Network settings lower your Bandwidth to 10BaseT from 100 throughput from full auto negotiate.

After you do that the game freezing will either disappear or happen less frequently.

If that does not solve your problem get the A7N8X deluxe MoB ver 2.0

After you see that what I am telling you is fact please post back here and tell these retards your problem is solved.

You are letting the idiots sway your respect of someone who is trying to help you in fact from your first posting the only person that tried to help you.

P.S any guy that talks about Counter Strike is a born hacker never listen to guys like them.

If you are using the Steam Network for CS or for DoD or any other game and most are now the computer freezing is in fact from hacker abuse not related to in game hacking but connectivity issues caused from hackers at the network levels.

Reducing your NIC cards ability to auto negotiate at full bandwidth and lowering it to 10 BaseT or to 100 BaseT or changing out the MoB to a better chip set including the onboard Nvidia LAN RJ45 where you set it from Full Autonegotiate to CPU will solve your problem.

I am and have been an Engineer for the last 20 years in High tech.

Many of these lemmings are cliff dwellers waiting to drop of a ledge into the unknown based on their grade 9 educations don't listen to them and do as I suggest.

After you see the problem solved please post back that it is, I would thank you for that.

Of course it doesn't hurt at all that I had the same MoB and the same problems in my wife's P.C and I fixed it the same way.

2 other things you can do are these. MS still has not corrected the operating system for XP to set these defaults on. If you are using XP home or Pro set these settings.

goto Start/Run and use the following command ( secpol.msc ) follow the path into Local Policies then Security Options. Once in there change the line That reads Shutdown: Clear virtual memory pagefile. Set it to Enabled by right clicking on it properties ENABLE this will clear your Virtual memory at P.C shut down and restart cleansing some of the graphics trash left over from the last game or crash you had. Microsoft should have this set to Enabled at install of 2000 or XP but they do not.

The other thing I want you to do is set your hard drive from 33 to 66 speeds in 2000 and XP all these tards including the know it alls in this post proly have hard drives that are capable of UDMA66 but don't even know they are running at UDMA33 the whole time even when they are doing all those fancy benchmarks LOL.

GO here!! To perk-up your hard drive or drives

Start/run then regedit

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

Add a new DWORD and call it ( EnableUDMA66 ), then give it a value of 1 by right clicking on it and entering 1
You will need to restart the computer for the changes to take effect. However, you should notice a definite performance increase relating to hard drive access

This could also improve your current freezing problem.

Barton 3200+ 400MHz
A7N8X Deluxe
Air Cooled 45C
2x512 Corsair DDR 400 PC3200
GeForce FX5900
Two Maxtor 40Gig 8MB cach 7200rpm
SONY RW 52x/24x/52x
SONY DVD 16x/40x