GPU suddenly behaves abnormally

[Gawin]

Hi. I have built my first gaming PC about half a year ago. Everything including games worked fine until today out of the blue. I booted up the system and started up Skyrim, the FPS dropped to 10-20 (usually 50-60). I knew something was wrong. I opened MSI Afterburner and saw the GPU usage was >90% (I don't remember the usual value but it was definitely lower than this. Assassin's Creed also performed poorly. And not only games perform poorly, just by opening Firefox causes my GPU usage to shoots up above 90%. However, GPU temperature runs at 30 degrees on idle and stable 60 degrees regardless of gaming or normal browsing. The only thing I did today that I didn't do normally was to open Easy Tune 6 that that came with my mobo drivers out of curiosity for the first time, but I did not mess around any settings! I restarted the system several times but it didn't help. CPU temperature seems fine at around 29-31 degrees. I am running the latest AMD driver and CCC. I have not overclocked my GPU or CPU.

My specs:
- CPU: I5-3570K @ 3.4GHz
- GPU: AMD HD 7850
- 8gb memory
- Gigabyte Ga-z77-d3h
- Antec True Power 750W power supply

I haven't tried reinstalling drivers yet but I want to see if anyone has any ideas what's going on before trying anything drastic. Thanks in advance

 

[JMer806]

I would reinstall the drivers and see if you still have a problem.

 

[EzioAs]

Might be a driver problem. Or might be some process running in the background. Open task manager and see whether there is a process using your cpu too high

 

[Gawin]

Reinstalling driver did nothing unfortunately. The same thing still happens: GPU seems normal on start up, but as soon as I open a web browser or a game, GPU usage shoots up to 94%, temperature shoots up to 60 degrees, and remains that way even if I turn off all the programs.

However I might have found the cause of it. I scanned the whole PC with Avast and it found 3 threats; 2 of which are "Bitcoin miners" and one malware. I have no idea what Bitcoin mining is but a few google searching seems to indicate it might increase GPU usage.

I clicked "moved to chest", restarted the system but the problem still persists. I also checked Task Manager as Ezio advised and saw one of the svchost.exe running at 168,996k. Disabling it turns windows 7 colour scheme to basic but did not lower the GPU usage.

 

[JMer806]

Run full malware, adware, virus scanners. Then use CCleaner. It's possible that these threats have gotten a little deeper into your system.

 

[Gawin]

Found the culprit. Turns out I got the "win32" virus and I found it on the startup in msconfig. Disabled it and the problem is gone after a reboot. I am downloading AVG again and hopefully it can remove it completely.

 

[EzioAs]

Nice to see the problem resolved

 

[JMer806]

Found the culprit. Turns out I got the "win32" virus and I found it on the startup in msconfig. Disabled it and the problem is gone after a reboot. I am downloading AVG again and hopefully it can remove it completely.

Perfect! Hopefully you won't have any more issues after this.

 

[Gawin]

Hopefully. Thanks for all your help. =)

 

[leanderthaler]

Found the culprit. Turns out I got the "win32" virus and I found it on the startup in msconfig. Disabled it and the problem is gone after a reboot. I am downloading AVG again and hopefully it can remove it completely.

I have the same problem can you please tell me how you fixed it.



Leander

 

[Gawin]

Found the culprit. Turns out I got the "win32" virus and I found it on the startup in msconfig. Disabled it and the problem is gone after a reboot. I am downloading AVG again and hopefully it can remove it completely.

I have the same problem can you please tell me how you fixed it.



Leander

I assume you also got a bitcoin miner or some other virus?

It was a long time ago so I don't remember the details. But obviously the first thing to do is to run your antivirus software and see if it picks up anything. For me, AVG free does the job well and saved my hide a number of times. Other things to try is to open up msconfig, go to startup and see if there is anything suspicious there (eg, ones with the manufacturer as unknown). Try Google anything you think might be suspicious. For my case it was called "win32" and by disabling that I was able to stop my GPU acting up after a reboot.

 

[leanderthaler]

Found the culprit. Turns out I got the "win32" virus and I found it on the startup in msconfig. Disabled it and the problem is gone after a reboot. I am downloading AVG again and hopefully it can remove it completely.

I have the same problem can you please tell me how you fixed it.

I've cleaned my video card out and reinstalled the driver and it did the job.
Probably my driver was still windows 7 (I upgraded to windows 8 2 days ago).

Leander

I assume you also got a bitcoin miner or some other virus?

It was a long time ago so I don't remember the details. But obviously the first thing to do is to run your antivirus software and see if it picks up anything. For me, AVG free does the job well and saved my hide a number of times. Other things to try is to open up msconfig, go to startup and see if there is anything suspicious there (eg, ones with the manufacturer as unknown). Try Google anything you think might be suspicious. For my case it was called "win32" and by disabling that I was able to stop my GPU acting up after a reboot.