General Discussions

[Taserface]

Hello,

I have a 5950x and 6900xt but I've been having issues with both.... First issue is what you can see below. At idle 2 cores are pegged at 100% usage and some others are spiking to 100% and back down. My CPU doesn't downclock and is always running at max voltage. I have checked the BIOS settings and using Balanced power plan and I just cant figure it out. The only process using CPU is system idle which I think isnt actually using it. 

The other issue is my GPU usage / power draw is all over the place. Depending on the game I get sporadic usage from 99% down to 50% and 60% and back up again every second. The power draw follows the usage and so do the core clocks so they are all working together which I guess makes sense. 

Anyone know whats going on here?

[Skrybe]

If you've got two cores hitting 100% usage for a long period of time (at least 60 seconds based on the graph you included) then you should be able to see what's causing that by checking Resource monitor. There is a link right on the Task Manager at the bottom. It should give you a more detailed view of what's happening.

Here is an explanation of what system idle actually is/does.

https://www.howtogeek.com/411569/what-is-system-idle-process-and-why-is-it-using-so-much-cpu/

Basically if you see it at say 100% that means your PC is doing nothing. If you look at the Processes tab instead of the Details tab in task manager you'll see that CPU usage is basically 0 or maybe 1%.

As for game GPU usage and power draw that sounds about normal. If your game is CPU bound the video card is sitting doing nothing some of the time so it's GPU usage drops and the power usage drops accordingly. If you're running older games, and/or at lower resolutions without high levels of anti aliasing I'd expect the GPU usage to be lower. On the other hand running something like CyberPunk 2077 at 4k with max graphics settings will peg out your GPU at 100% and max out the power usage too.

You'll even see this behaviour in the same game. For example: World of Warcraft uses a lot of particle effects in Ardenweald (which are GPU intensive) so my 6900XT sits at 50% utilization in most of the world but as soon as I hit Ardenweald it's 100% and the power usage jumps by nearly 200W.