CPU suddenly glacially slow


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Hey all,

 

I've got this rig, currently:

 

Mainboard: Gigabyte Z77MX-D3H

CPU: Intel i5 3570k

RAM: 16GB DDR3 1366mhz

GPU: AMD Radeon 6950 2GB

 

So... This PC was using Windows 7 for a year or so, and suddenly the graphics performance in apps and games (Photoshop and Guild Wars 2 in this case) became very sluggish.  I attributed it to a slow hard drive and old Windows 7 installation, so I got an SSD and installed Windows 8.1 Pro on it.  I hadn't checked CPU performance under load at the time.

 

But now, I'm looking at the CPU under load and see this:

 

M4VBem8.jpg

 

That's with Photoshop open.  When I close Photoshop, the CPU speed returns to normal, around 3GHz, on and off. 

 

So it seems to be underclocking when under load.  Any ideas?  I have done the following:

 

  • Cleaned processor / gpu fans
  • Installed Windows 8.1
  • Installed all latest drivers from OEM
  • Installed all Windows updates
  • Updated to latest Mainboard BIOS
  • Reset BIOS to default settings

There does not appear to be any hardware faults, so I'm not sure what the issue is.

 

Thanks for any help in advance.

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Well I know I cant help you but just for some more information

 

how is your boot times do they seem slower than they should be?

 

Boot times are near instantaneous with the new Intel SSD.

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Could it be thermal throttling kicking in because it's overheating?  <<< edit - despite everything else I said, this still seems to be the most likely reason for this but more info would be nice!

 

Try having a look at temps with something like HWmonitor

 

What happens if you leave photoshop  open in the background?

 

Simply having photoshop open shouldn't really do much to the temps/clock speed unless you're actually doing something with it.

 

Also, if you're machine is idle, the clock speed should be lower. Is the clock speed reaching 3ghz constantly when idle? That sounds sort of backwards :s

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In that screenshot I see 16% utilisation which tells me the CPU isn't a bottleneck. It's barely 50% of 1 core. Does it stay like that when you actually do something CPU-intensive like applying a filter to a large image? Just having Photoshop open doesn't use your CPU. If you're seeing very low CPU usage when doing something CPU-intensive then you have some other serious bottleneck, I'm not sure what that could be.

 

Closing Photoshop actually is CPU-intensive so that's why you're seeing the frequency jump to 3Ghz and back. This is normal.

 

Sluggish performance in video accelerated applications is more likely to be related to your video card. Photoshop uses OpenCL in recent versions. Could be a driver or PSU issue for instance. Try running some video card benchmark and see if your results compare with owners of the same video card. For instance https://unigine.com/products/heaven/download/

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If I had to make a guess, it could be a power issue.

Check your power outputs using a multimeter. It's possible the graphics card is suddenly being starved of power and is downclocking to compensate.

 

As a test, if you use the onboard graphics, is it better at all? If so, then you have your culprit!

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