Don't think it's throttling, but

[soccerballtux]

I've got a TR-Ultra 120; and my proc is going ~60C at most when gaming; and in games, UT3, Ut2k4, etc, framerate will occasionally drop to about 15FPS for a few seconds; not sure why.

When not gaming, I've noticed the processor spikes to 100% for a period of time, however every time I look at the task manager it seems to go away before I catch which process it is.

My thinking is it could be the same thing.

When it does this and I'm gaming, my graphics card temp drops ~4c before it returns to normal; but this is only when it's at say 66C; I've been to 85 no problem.

 

[james1701]

Sounds like a background program running. Have you checked for spyware?

 

[krnmastersgt]

What james1701 said, you should run some anti-spyware/virus software and see if anything comes up.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: soccerballtux
I've noticed the processor spikes to 100% for a period of time, however every time I look at the task manager it seems to go away before I catch which process it is.

Lots of things can cause this, not all them are malicious or undesirable.

Diskeeper for example will run background defrag stuff. Also Windows will delay some disk activities such as caching filenames for quick searching and the like until your computer is idle. I'm pretty sure microsoft updates does the same thing.

To figure out what is going on you need to leave task manager as a foreground application, disable your screen saver so you don't have to touch anything to see what task manager is seeing, and leave task manager on the "Processes" tab with the "CPU" column sorted in decreasing processor utlization.

Then leave your computer idle and randomly walk by and check to confirm "System Idle Process" is at the top of the rankings with 98-99% utilization (i.e. the computer is idle).

If you see something like DKService.exe at or near the top then diskkeeper is doing stuff with your hard-drive.

If you see svchost.exe at or near the top then this is likely to be microsoft update at work checking to see if your system has all the latest from Redmond.

 

[krnmastersgt]

While that may be true for his idle 100% cpu usage, he's having a problem while in games in which case I would assume something is running that shouldn't be.

 

[Martimus]

If you see svchost.exe at or near the top then this is likely to be microsoft update at work checking to see if your system has all the latest from Redmond.

SVCHost could be anything though. It is just a generic name for an unspecified process.

 

[tigersty1e]

To catch the process in the act, right-click your time on the lower right hand side and select task manager without hitting ctrl + alt + del.... just in case because hitting ctrl + alt + del could trigger some action.

Are you on Vista?

Is the drop in framerate a slight stutter or hitch or is it a continuous stream of 15 fps (longer than 5 seconds or so)? Almost everyone stutters but if it's continuous then it's a problem...

 

[v8envy]

Process Explorer is your friend. It used to be from sysinternals, but now microsoft serves it up.

That lets you see which dll or child process is hogging your CPU on behalf of svchost. Absolutely invaluable to tuning those hard to debug windows performance issues. It's task manager on steroids.