My i7 920 never really gets above 4% activity

Hi Guys,

Why is it that my CPU never really gets above 10% of activity when being used? *Even in gaming at FHD. I boot up windows and it's whirring away loading all the heuristics in ESET etc etc, at about ~4%-5% activity, is this normal? I use a cpu meter gadget/widget that comes with Windows 7 to read what it's doing. Surely the whole point of having a cpu is to USE it,. not to use just a tiny portion of what it's capable of. I have it slightly oc'd from 2.4GHz to about 2.6GHz. Is there a setting in the Asus P6T BIOS that allows the CPU to be used at higher capacity/activity without the mention of any overclocking? I just want to increase the percentage of usage, (if safe), - make sense?
I can use RealTemp to keep an eye on the temperatures.
I'm a pc veteran, but have never really given this side of my CPU much thought, bizarrely.

Thanks!

 

can you try the SuperPi(?) program ?

edit:
or better Prime95 which should stress all cores.

 

Get Throttlestop and check again. Some tools are not reliable at all.

I recommend using wPrime 1.55 and do a short 32M test on 8 threads, monitor the load with throttlestop. So you will be easily able to see whether your CPU works fine or not.


When it works you can use throttlestop to push your xtreme CPU a bit more and really unleash the whole potential of this beast processor.

Btw, what system do you use?

 

Hi all, thanks for the replies so far!

I've not created a sig, but this is what it'd be:

Asus P6T, Intel Core i7 920 quad core @ 2.6GHz, 12Gb Patriot Viper RAM 1600MHz, 1Tb F3 Samsung. 500Gb Hitachi, Antec 750w modular PSU, Corsair H50 CPU cooler, ATI Radeon Sapphire HD5850 1Gb.

The CPU I am sure will run at 100%, but it seems never to have done that during any Terragen rendering or Vue 7 renders, (when I had Vue7 sci-fi). It never used more than about 15% during any FHD maxed-out BFBC2 gameplay. Is there any other way of stressing the CPU without downloading Prime95 or similar? I have used, (prurely for the need to rather than as a means to test the CPU), things like Defragmentation, copying huge files etc but it just seems to refuse to use only a fraction of what it seems capable of, (all according to the CPU meter in W7 x64).

Surely my pc would open programs and load start-up bits much faster if the CPU was operating at 100% as opposed to ~10% - right? Wrong?

I'm just wondering if there's a setting in the BIOS that will make the CPU run at 100% if it really has to. I WANT it to run at 100% all the time I ask it to do something so it completes tasks quicker - that was why I bought it.

Thanks again.

 

The CPU has very little to do with opening programs and loading things. That's all on the hard drive, and that's the bottleneck of almost all machines currently. An SSD or a hybrid like the Momentus XT is the only way to speed that up.

The only thing you're trying to ascertain by running Prime95 is that the CPU isn't being throttled artificially by some software, that it is capable of running 100% if given enough data to do so.

 

Since you have a desktop machine, you should ask your question on the Desktop review forums.

 

Ever wonder why CPUs since 2003 has been 2Ghz+ and hasn't really gotten to 10Ghz yet? Besides the cooling problems it's just not needed. Your CPU can do trillions of operations per second so nothing you do can bog it down that much.

Your apps and other stuff that you do wont work faster since they are limited by other things but mainly the HDD. As other people said, a SSD will make your system fly compared to a faster CPU. Each time you request something the CPU crunches some then waits then crunches then wait for data from the HDD.

I've always wondered why people want to get the fastest CPU available to check email or something like that as if that makes sense. Surely if you are encoding video or doing something majorly taxing (video encoding is done on the GPU these days too) then a faster CPU wont make a difference in anything. People always look at a 1.4Ghz Core 2 Duo ULV as if it's some red headed step child but frankly for most tasks it'll be 100x faster than needed.

 

OK yes, true. What about things that mostly tax the CPU like rendering then? I don't really want to use a stress tester, but will later tonight. I'll use 3DMark too while I'm at it for the fun of it.

 

Since you're talking about a desktop forget what I said about Throttlestop... afaik it's only for mobile CPUs (I could be wrong though....)

Like saturnotaku said you'll find more help at the desktop forum than at the notebook forum...

 

Yes, Take the discussion to desktopreview.com. Registration may be required.

Thanks for your cooperation.