New notebook hiccups

Hello, im not sure if this is the place to post this but im in need of help. I have a sager np9262 that is now maybe a month old. I have already had to reinstall vista once. I have a 9650 quad 3.0 ghz and 9800m gtx with 4 gigs ram. I play WoW (havent installed anything else because im afraid of another crash) at 1920x1200 and usually have a decent framerate. This past week I have noticed that while im playing, one core of my cpu is almost 100%, one is at 50% and the other two are at about 8%. Now I dont know if thats normal but either way it seems that wow should push it that hard. Also while i was playing with vent, xfire, and wow running at the same time, i was getting a stuttery performance on wow, howevere the fps was at about 140 so that cant be the problem. I am also getting random spikes in cpu usage while idling in only on core at a time. Any help with any of this would be great, Thanks.

 

Can't say about the CPU spikes but the WoW lag would be because of the GPU. Have you tried updating drivers?

 

WoW is fairly old. Perhaps you should trying a recent game that stimulates all 4 CPUs on your Q9650. If the problem persists, then we can narrow down the problem.

 

You won't get even usage across all four cores unless you're using an app that has been written to take advantage of multiple cores - about the only software that is reliably written for multiple cores right now are things like cad/cam and video processing software. Thus, it is likely that Wow was running on the core with the highest usage, and the next highest was carrying a lot of OS stuff.

The stuttering is most likely due to increased latency on the FSB caused, in part, by the other programs you were running at the same time - each bus access monopolizes the bus, meaning nothing else can use it, so each time one of those other programs accessed the bus, that meant that the graphics cards couldn't access the bus - if enough non-graphic access is going on, eventually the GPUs will start to exhibit stuttering.