Second HDD cause of High CPU/Constant CPU problems on samsung series 7 17.3 NP700Z7C-S01UB

I, along with others here have had high cpu issues with the latest bios. I finally figured out what the cause was on my model. I'm running bios P03.

Today I went and grabbed another 17.3 from best buy to test. My original NP700Z7C-S01UB and the new NP700Z7C-S01UB from best buy, virtually identical aside from my second drive bay installed in place of the CD/DVD.

After testing most the day and swapping drives, I've ruled out everything else, and determined that having a second hard drive caddy in place where the CD/DVD drive used to be caused high cpu (20% constant at idle) on both models.

I tested the same drives in each system with identical configurations, both resulted in the same constant/higher cpu with the second drive installed.

Hope this helps some folks out there, if you want your idle cpu back to 0%, you may need to install the optical drive for a while or just leave the 2nd bay empty until the next bios update.

-Jeremy

 

That figures, so I get to either give up my second hard drive or stick with the crappy P01 bios.

 

Good investigative work! :thumbsup: It's always good to at least have an explanation for a problem even if it isn't ideal.

 

Yeah this was probably the most frustrated I've been debugging hardware, but it's very repeatable and I'm confident that is the issue. I don't think samsung did it on purpose either...I'm sure it was just something that was overlooked and may be fixed in the next bios revision. I guess we'll see.

 

Probability would be Samsung does not have a system with a caddy to test it with. Probability too is that their resopnce may be the system is not designed to run in this manner. and is out of stock configuration. Will they fix it though?

 

Thank you for reporting the results of your investigation. Perhaps there is a change in the way that the 2nd HDD is reported by the BIOS to the operating system.

I would start investigating Intel Rapid Storage Technology.

John

 

I don't believe it's iRST but I could be wrong. Even with a vanilla win7 install (no drivers installed) it exhibits the same behavior with higher cpu. It's worth trying out I suppose, but it seemed to be a problem that wasn't tied to a specific driver.

 

I put in a support ticket last night and a product support specialist is supposed to be getting back to me about it on Monday, if anything happens I'll forward the new information to them as well and hopefully we get something resolved with this.

 

I would have to ask, again just a thought, when you have a DVD drive there with media inserted do you still have the high CPU draw? I ask about with the media as without the media the DVD drive would not really be tying up the drives specific bus with any data.............

 

Yes it has the same higher cpu usage with a cd/dvd in the drive. If I put in a windows 7 install dvd and do nothing (close dialogs), it will stay steady cpu usage. The second you eject and the DVD comes out, it's down to 0% cpu.

 

Is this with P05AAE? I'm wondering if updating to this will create the same problem on my NP700Z7C-S01US

 

Then this is a definate problem with the systems standard configuration. If Samsung refuses to fix as "The Sata slot is not for HDD use" then just get them to fix the high CPU usage with DVD media installed. They have to fix issues of the system being used normally............

 

I don't have this bios with the S01UB. If you aren't having high cpu problems now and don't have other complaints/fixes, I wouldn't upgrade until they come out with the next revision and people test cpu usage on it.