i7 3610QM/GTX 660m running hot at idle

Hey guys,

Just something I noticed recently when I was downloading a game from steam. The fan was on full blast and a lot of heat was coming out, but I found that strange since all I was doing was downloading!

So I noticed in HWMonitor that when idle (browsing the web, or just sitting on the desktop) my cpu cores are ranging in the mid 60's to the mid-high 70's!! And I'm using a U3 notebook cooler and the fans are positioned right!!

The interesting thing is while under full load, it's not that much higher. I am constantly in the 70's when gaming, but never break 80C.

GPU temps are pretty much the same. 60's during idle, 70's during gaming.

My system:
i7 3610qm 2.3GHz
GTX 660m
8GB Ram
Windows 7 Ultimate

What's going on? Thank you!

Edit: Just noticed the culprit. Nvidia GPU is running at 99% load all the time, even at idle. That's really strange. Any idea why this is or how to fix it?

 

the good news is that your temps are nowhere near dangerously hot and they never break 80C. the not-so-good news is that that's definitely warm. what machine do you have? stock thermal grease pasted by factory? what's your ambient temp? my np9150 idles at 38-48C and is more like ~60s while gaming or under heavy load. i would guess that a thorough cleaning (depending on how old and dusty the machine is) and a repaste should bring those temps down.


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EDIT: ninja'd by OP. this now appears to be a GPU issue.

 

My laptop is a Lenovo Y580. Got it in August.

I live in SoCal, so my room can get warm. But it's next to a window, and has the U3 cooling it and a desk fan blowing air from the window towards it.

Might consider a repaste, but now that I've figured out the reason of why it's so hot at idle (99% nvidia gpu usage all the time), if I can fix that I may not need to.

Any idea why it's at 99% load all the time? In the control panel the global setting is auto select, and the nvidia's power management is adaptive.

Okay this is really strange. Now my games are getting poor fps where they were fine before. (and gpu load still at 99%).

 

repaste shouldn't be necessary. you've definitely discovered the issue. what drivers are you running? maybe try uninstalling and reinstalling, rolling back to WHQL if you're currently running beta, use the notification area icon to see what program/s are using the dGPU. it would seem as though you've got optimus problems.

 

Yea I fear I'm running on integrated for all my games, even though I had my program settings still making it use my nvidia gpu. I just downloaded the 310.61 drivers which was supposed to be better for Hitman Absolution. I'll delete everything (including optimus settings) and try again.

If that doesn't work (still 99% load and optimus issues) should I roll back the the older beta 310.54 or WHQL?

 

all of the above. on the other hand if you've uninstalled/reinstalled three different driver sets and the issue persists, then it's looking less like a GPU driver issue. some screenshots might help (where you're looking at GPU utilization, task manager, etc.).

 

Figured out the issue, see post below.

 

So I figured out the issue.

There were some .exe files in a folder called Windows in My Documents. Some of them were dllupdate.exe and eclipse.exe, as well as a few programs that started with "win."

When I started windows and got the desktop, every time dllupdate (and sometimes eclipse.exe) asked my permission to launch. The verified publisher was unkown but when I clicked more details there was something about a hotmail address in there. I don't think these were a virus (scanned with Microsoft Security Essentials and no threats detected) but I think they had something to do with MSE since it would say I wasn't protected until I clicked yes on these programs.

So I booted up into safe mode, deleted the folder, rebooted, and cpu usage was low and I get normal fps in games. Also, no more 99% gpu usage at idle and temps are in the 40's C with my CPU and GPU!

Only problem though is when I start up it recreated the folder with only one .exe in it, but it doesn't ask me to launch or show up as processes in task manager. I have no idea what that was but hopefully problem solved?

 

i think so, at least for the time being. good deal. interesting/relevant first result if you google 'eclipse.exe.' i wonder why that would have been utilizing the GPU though. you're now that much closer to a windows reinstall.

 

Yay.. going to reboot and see if it comes back, if it does I'll uninstall MSE and get another security software.

 

Download Avira Fee Antivirus. the only problem with it is closing advertisment notification about once per week.

 

Ack the windows folder somehow keeps coming back... this time it's msnotepad.exe thats making my laptop run under full load...

Notice in task manager each of these is described as "Critical System Services" in the description tab.. wonder what that means. I hope this isn't a virus.

 

closer than we thought to that reinstall. it'd be time if it was me.

 

I wanna wait on that.. I just had to reinstall windows not too long ago because I had to rma my ssd, so I had to reinstall windows on my hdd.

Now I get this... I haven't even downloaded anything to give me a virus!! I'm gonna try a different program to see if it comes up with anything.

 

launch GPU-z and look at GPU load. Ten launch Nvidia Inspector at the same time and look if gpu starts idling.

I heard about idle problems with Keppler GPUs.

I would reinstall Windows

 

:/ why.. ..just install ad-aware and do a scan.

 

I haven't downloaded anything suspicious. I tried scanning my computer with Nod32 Antivirus, Malwarebytes, and Superantispyware, and none of them detected the threat. Although everytime I started up windows, the windows folder in my documents would be there, and Malwarebytes asks me to quarantine the .exe inside of it. (what looks like windows services- winsvc.exe, ect)

So upon researching a bit more, I found this page. The OP of this thread seems to be having the same problem:
winsvchost.exe « How-To Geek Forums

I knew the problem wasn't winsvc.exe since that would be recreated on bootup by some other program, so I searched around the net for info on winsvchost.exe. I then looked up HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run in regedit and deleted the winsvchost value that was found there. Looking at the registry value I also saw that the program had a file path of C:\Users\User\Appdata\Roaming\Identities\(a bunch of random number and letters separated by hyphons)\winsvchost.exe. So I went there and deleted that too.

So far I've had no issues with the Windows folder getting recreated or those programs trying to run! So it was some sort of virus/trojan designed to steal my personal info. I hope it didn't steal anything before I knew this was a threat and blocked it.

As to how it got there, during my research I read something about it possibly being a worm that spreads through removable drives, so that may be how it got infected. Well, that narrows it down, since I have a smartphone, a removable hdd, and a usb drive =\

Thanks for the help though guys! I think (and hope) it's gone for good.

 

(I was joking. ..sort of. 99% of the time, viruses like that spread because people download executables and just run them. There's the "I love jihad" worms as well, put out by "official channels". "Stuxnet". It's real.. They are spread that way).

But what happens is that you install some smileys package, a free program with an extra install-package from a suspicious download site (this could be something such as popular shareware repackaged with malware - happens often). If you have Messenger or use Exchange with all the default features enabled, just having received a spam e-mail with a virus in your in-box and having it previewed (because the parser runs code when it displays the preview) could be enough. If you have an outdated internet explorer, flash files can run commands like that without even giving you a prompt.

The program then adds a new component with the same name as a windows component as a new process. The most annoying ones will run perfectly known commands to get the virus backed up by windows, so it will be restored later, and therefore avoid the need to have the virus being run on startup in the HKEY_.../Run or RunOnce register. The one you have that just writes itself to the "run" path in the registry are the simplest ones. Most of them don't do anything other than just stay where they are and run loops that hang. Somehow managing to make the gpu run - first time I've heard of. Could be an experiment someone ran, trying to figure out if it was possible to steal gpu processing instead of cpu time. The real genius would be the guy who could manage to make it run without a cuda runtime library of some sort installed separately. Would be much more difficult to spot on an office-desktop, because it won't even run slower than usual, if it's small enough. ..if it spreads across local/"home" networks via sharing, then you could probably get away with larger packages as well ).

Just make sure you have ad-aware installed, do regular scans. And check pdf-files, exe-files, msi-files, etc., with a virus-checker before running them.

Don't bank on that removing the executable is going to remove the virus either. If it got there via the network services, for example, you're still wide open.

 

seconded--GPU utilization is one of the stranger pieces here. also agree that simply making a registry change and deleting the obvious files shouldn't be relied upon as a conclusive fix. probably didn't edit or remove everything that was "touched." whether or not that warrants an OS reinstall depends on how much free time you have. i always get a little paranoid when software starts messing with services that then adversely affect the hardware configuration.

 

You aren't the only one getting paranoid when that kind of things happens. Personally, i prefer going overkill than not doing enough so i'm reinstall happy when that happens. Given that I had one infection in 2005 and one in 2009 (which was easily removed) i had to reinstall often.

 

..er...I read a bit on things - turns out you actually can call a precompiled opencl dll from another executable. So that's probably what's going on. The program in the "run" script just creates kernels, or new operations once in a while, the functions run on the app-data path, dumps things to somewhere else.

Should be a great way to pick up passwords, mail-addresses and login names. Quick and quiet.

 

Could easily be virus or malware.
either way, I recommend you download Malwarebytes, update it and scan the system with it.
MSE is pretty good, but like any other AV, its not perfect and cannot catch everything (therefore it is recommended to have MBAM with it).