Second core always at > 50% usage

urchin

I just finished reinstalling XP Pro on one of my machines and have an incredibly debilitating problem now. My x2 3800+ (socket 939) is acting slow - on task manager the second core is never below 50%, even when the system is idling. Sometimes it's at 80% with only minor background processes running! I checked task manager and there is nothing significant there - the system idle process is typically listed as using between 95% and 99% of the CPU but then I flip to the performance tab and see core 1 at 5% and core 2 at 50-80%1 I even checked and none of my programs are assigned to a single core. Any ideas? Thanks!

Photon

If you go View-> show kernel times, in task manager then view your cpu usage graphs ... is most of that usage on your 2nd core a red line?

urchin

The green and red lines match up near perfectly on both cores.

Photon

In that case, i think ive had something similar before.

The red line represents cpu time being used up by the windows kernel ... its pretty unlikely that there is a problem with windows itself that is causing all that CPU usage, and the only other thing that really shows up as kernel time are drivers.

I'd start by removing or disabling any hardware that isnt absolutely neccesary, one by one and see if you can find the culprit. For me i had this problem with my firewire port, for some reason i had like 80% cpu usage, and the second i click disable in device manager it jumps straight back to 0.

urchin

I uninstalled my nvidia drivers and the kernel usage and cpu usage on the second core dropped to a normal level. I have tried several different drivers now, but all of them cause this problem. I wish I could remember which drivers I was using before I reformatted...

urchin

I think I fixed it. All I did was goto the nvidia control panel, goto 3D settings > Adjust image settings with preview and selected "Let the 3D application decide.

For reference, I had already installed the dual core patch prior to posting this topic.