Intel i5-2400 excessive CPU usage?

avatarair

Honorable
Sep 12, 2012
118
0
10,680
Hello everybody, so I've had this i5 for a while now and its always seemed pretty effective for my needs, never even going past 30% CPU usage the vast majority of the time. However, I recently added a bit of hardware to my desktop and used the opportunity to clean the PC. I used some compressed air cans and put the stock intel CPU fan under some water so as to wash all the dust away but made sure to dry it afterwards and the fan works fine. To be specific about the hardware, all I added was a 2tb Seagate SSHD and a stick of RAM.

With this I also found out that 2 of my memory slots cause the computer to not start up when they have a stick of RAM in them, and after starting my computer I'm seeing massive CPU usage, massive spikes, and lots of time where all four cores will max out, stay maxed out, and sometimes crash my PC.

Ont op of this programs like chrome that I had almost no trouble with before and now insanely laggy, as is any game I load up. (Example: Perfect World on minimum gives me about 8 FPS).

Could there be something wrong with the CPU or does this not sound like a CPU problem?

Thanks for any and all help, I really appreciate it.
 
Solution


Both the CPU surface and heatsink base need to be clean.
Thermal paste is typically applied to the CPU surface rather the heat sink.


Yes I removed it all, but of course the power was disconnected. I did wipe and reapply new paste on the heatsink as well. I didn't wipe the cpu socket though but I assumed I shouldn't touch that, should I reapply paste to that as well?
 


Both the CPU surface and heatsink base need to be clean.
Thermal paste is typically applied to the CPU surface rather the heat sink.
 
Solution