Question PC crashing - - - "Out of video memory trying to allocate a texture/rendering resource" ?

[ringmany]

Hi everyone,

I posted this in the systems forum originally, went through a lot of trouble shooting but didn't find a solution. Posting on here now because I think that this may be due to my GPU but I need confirmation.

My PC has been having issues lately, and I'm not certain what is causing the issue. I built this model around 5 years ago, all brand new hardware. My GPU is a MSI 1070, 5 years old.

My full hardware specs are here:
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/RingMany/saved/WXCWXL

For around two months now, I'm constantly getting memory related errors, both in chrome and on my PC in general, so I'm not sure which is to blame. I'm getting a variety of errors such as:

"Out of video memory trying to allocate a texture/rendering resource"
"AW, Snap! Google Chrome ran out of memory while trying to display this webpage"
"Not enough memory to open this page"
"Windows ran out of memory"

It happens several times a day. Even if I just have 2 chrome tabs open, browsing YouTube, it will either close all the tabs. Or tabs with crash with a memory error, or all of my pages turn white and I need to use task manager to close Chrome.

The things I've tried so far:

• Disabled hardware acceleration on Chrome and Discord
• I uninstalled of my graphics card drives, then re-installed
• Ran sfc /scannow and repaired any corrupted files
• Changed my virtual pagefile settings
• Ran CrystalDiskInfo and all my pc hard drives were ok, although the primary SSD is showing (Good 68%) it's only 2 years old.
• I used TestMem5 and no issues there

========= TestMem5 Log File =========
Customize: ABSOLUT(01102021) @anta777
Start testing at 11:01, 512Mb x16
Testing completed in 1:16.39, no errors.

• I ran FurMark GPU stress test for an hour, no errors or issues there.
• I used memtestVulkan to test the virtual memory, ran it for an error and got. But PC didn't crash or anything at all.

Runtime error: ERROR_DEVICE_LOST while getting () in context wait_for_fences

Seems child excited for no reason, code 69

memtest_vulkan: First test passed, but THEN runtime error occured

• I did a full virus scan of my PC, it detected several vulnerabilities and quarantined them. The PC seemed to improve for a day after that, then the memory usage went down from 60% to 40% but the issue is back again.
• I also purchased some new RAM just in case it was hardware issue, and I'm still getting the same error with 2 new sticks of RAM. I now have 64gb in total, but I did test using only the 2 new sticks and removed the old one.

Even with page file increased, it was decent for a little bit, but still getting the error. Plus I haven't made any changes to my PC. I'm still playing the same old guys I've been playing for years. I'm now also experiencing windows itself crashing with problem with device. This has happened twice today already.

At this stage I don't know what else to check, whether it's software, or hardware. I'm suspicious it is my graphics card, but I want to confirm as it's a lot of money to buy a new graphics card, since I may as well upgrade if I do. Plus I don't want to buy a new one and find it wasn't the GPU.

 

[Lutfij]

On Windows 10 or above you shouldn't tinker with the page file numbers. You might've needed to do that on Windows 7 but not on the latter OSes.

When posting a thread of troubleshooting nature, it's customary to include your full system's specs. Please list the specs to your build like so:
CPU:
CPU cooler:
Motherboard:
Ram:
SSD/HDD:
GPU:
PSU:
Chassis:
OS:
Monitor:
include the age of the PSU apart from it's make and model. BIOS version for your motherboard at this moment of time.

 

[ringmany]

On Windows 10 or above you shouldn't tinker with the page file numbers. You might've needed to do that on Windows 7 but not on the latter OSes.

When posting a thread of troubleshooting nature, it's customary to include your full system's specs. Please list the specs to your build like so:
CPU:
CPU cooler:
Motherboard:
Ram:
SSD/HDD:
GPU:
PSU:
Chassis:
OS:
Monitor:
include the age of the PSU apart from it's make and model. BIOS version for your motherboard at this moment of time.

Ah my bad, forgot to include the hardware, it's here:
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/RingMany/saved/WXCWXL

A lot of posts were all recommending editing the pagefile, even on modern OS. I've had it set to system managed for a long time too, but same errors.

 

[ringmany]

One thing to mention is that I'm currently running on dual monitors and sometimes one of the monitors will just stop working, it loses signal then all my tabs and everything go to one screen. I then have to reboot the entire PC to get it so both monitors work again.

Sometimes the entire PC will freeze, then every time I click my mouse I just hear a loud beep with every click.

 

[Mahisse]

Hi.

It seems to me you need to test the physical memory more extensively. I would focus 100% on a throughouly memory test because everything seems to point in that direction.
Personally, I'd recommend MemTest86 and testing each slot individually. It's a tedious task but it something that you should do.
On a personal experience I've run other memory tests within windows as well, which never caught my faulty memory but MemTest86 did.

Did you ever test only one of your sticks in the system?

Also in the Task Manager screenshot you have 4 out of 4 slots but the system says you only have 32 GB RAM? Weren't you supposed to have 64 if you used all the slots? (you mentioned you bought the extra RAM. Were they 2x16 GB sticks... or how does this add up?)

Are all your memory sticks the same brand/type?

 

[ringmany]

Hi.

It seems to me you need to test the physical memory more extensively. I would focus 100% on a throughouly memory test because everything seems to point in that direction.
Personally, I'd recommend MemTest86 and testing each slot individually. It's a tedious task but it something that you should do.
On a personal experience I've run other memory tests within windows as well, which never caught my faulty memory but MemTest86 did.

Did you ever test only one of your sticks in the system?

Also in the Task Manager screenshot you have 4 out of 4 slots but the system says you only have 32 GB RAM? Aren't you supposed to have 64 if you used all the slots? (you mentioned bought the extra RAM)

Are all your memory sticks the same brand/type?

Cheers for the suggestion,
I already did a test using MemTest86 and got no errors. I posted the log result above.
Corsair provided me with two brand new sticks on RAM, which I replaced in my PC and removed the old ones, and I was still getting the memory errors. So I don't think it's faulty RAM and I tested with 2 brand new sticks, removed the old ones, so it doesn't seem that's fault.
Also each stick of RAM is only 8GB.

 

[Mahisse]

Cheers for the suggestion,
I already did a test using MemTest86 and got no errors. I posted the log result above.
Corsair provided me with two brand new sticks on RAM, which I replaced in my PC and removed the old ones, and I was still getting the memory errors. So I don't think it's faulty RAM and I tested with 2 brand new sticks, removed the old ones, so it doesn't seem that's fault.
Also each stick of RAM is only 8GB.

You did not mentioned MemTest86 . You mentioned TestMem5, which is a windows based software. And then the memtestVulkan, which is for the VRAM.

(EDIT: My bad you did post the screenshot of the test. Either way make sure you did the test for each slot)

I can only recommend trying to do the MemTest86 as well, just to be safe. As mentioned, only one
stick in one individual slot at a time to make sure it's not a fauly slot causing the issue. To me it sounds a bit like you may have a faulty slot. Either way you have something that is corrupting the memory process.

In your Task Manager screenshot it says you are using 7,6 GB RAM. Is this in idle or is it a representation of, when you are using Chrome/Firefox/any other applications?

 

[Avro Arrow]

I can't say that I know what the problem is but we're talking about a card that came out almost 8 years ago (~7 years, 9 months) and is therefore ancient. It's even older than Zen 1 and performs only slightly better than my old R9 Fury.

If you're at all able, you should probably just replace your GTX 1070. It wouldn't cost much to get a huge boost because a $230 RX 6650 XT would give you a performance uplift of almost 60%. If you're able to do $340, then you can get an RX 6750 XT with 12GB of VRAM and a whopping 92% performance uplift.

 

[ringmany]

You did not mentioned MemTest86 . You mentioned TestMem5, which is a windows based software. And then the memtestVulkan, which is for the VRAM.

(EDIT: My bad you did post the screenshot of the test. Either way make sure you did the test for each slot)

I can only recommend trying to do the MemTest86 as well, just to be safe. As mentioned, only one
stick in one individual slot at a time to make sure it's not a fauly slot causing the issue. To me it sounds a bit like you may have a faulty slot. Either way you have something that is corrupting the memory process.

In your Task Manager screenshot it says you are using 7,6 GB RAM. Is this in idle or is it a representation of, when you are using Chrome/Firefox/any other applications?

You did not mentioned MemTest86 . You mentioned TestMem5, which is a windows based software. And then the memtestVulkan, which is for the VRAM.

(EDIT: My bad you did post the screenshot of the test. Either way make sure you did the test for each slot)

I can only recommend trying to do the MemTest86 as well, just to be safe. As mentioned, only one
stick in one individual slot at a time to make sure it's not a fauly slot causing the issue. To me it sounds a bit like you may have a faulty slot. Either way you have something that is corrupting the memory process.

In your Task Manager screenshot it says you are using 7,6 GB RAM. Is this in idle or is it a representation of, when you are using Chrome/Firefox/any other applications?

Cheers I'll give that a try while I'm at work. Kind of annoying since each test via Memtest86 takes around 2.5 hours to complete and I've got to do that for all 4 individual slots.

That screenshot was with a few tabs open. This is what it looks like with PC freshly booted, nothing open

 

[ringmany]

I can't say that I know what the problem is but we're talking about a card that came out almost 8 years ago (~7 years, 9 months) and is therefore ancient. It's even older than Zen 1 and performs only slightly better than my old R9 Fury.

If you're at all able, you should probably just replace your GTX 1070. It wouldn't cost much to get a huge boost because a $230 RX 6650 XT would give you a performance uplift of almost 60%. If you're able to do $340, then you can get an RX 6750 XT with 12GB of VRAM and a whopping 92% performance uplift.

While the graphics card model is fairly old, my GPU itself is only 5 years old and I've never had any problems with it. I wouldn't consider it ancient. I play a lot of older games and some modern such as The Witcher 3, Hitman, Metal Gear Solid 5, Valorant, Hogwarts Legacy, Hitman, Jedi Survivor, all of these games I can play on nearly max settings (except Hogwarts), so it still holds up pretty well, I'm only using 1080p.

Yeah I would like to replace my GPU at some point, but there's several other factors in play. Firstly I'd like to sell my old hardware after I upgrade my PC, so I need to know which component is causing the errors, or else I'm going to get a very angry customer and bad reputation.

Plus I'd be experiencing bottle necks on other components so I'd have to end up upgrading my CPU and motherboard, which is going to cost a lot of money which I don't currently have at the moment. Plus I also use a custom water loop in my PC which connects through the CPU and GPU, so I'd also need another waterblock for the GPU which costs around £120-150. So it's going to get very costly if I upgrade.

Curious how come you're recommending the RX series? I haven't upgraded a GPU in 5 years so I'm quite out of the loop, most people seem to have always gone for RTX / Nvidea cards in past. I'm happy to have a larger budget of around £500 to buy a new GPU such as a 4070 when I do upgrade.

 

[ringmany]

More errors are starting to prout up sadly, the past 2 days I'm now also starting to get Windows device errors too. Again, not sure which device:

I saw a user in another post with the same error, turns out that his was related to his CPU. I did a stress test on my CPU using OCCT. Funny thing is that the first attempt I used, when I first to start the test, my PC crashed with a Windows error within like 2 seconds. but then I re-ran the test again twice, on extreme settings but there weren't any errors.

 

[Avro Arrow]

While the graphics card model is fairly old, my GPU itself is only 5 years old and I've never had any problems with it. I wouldn't consider it ancient.

I meant the tech, not the card. At the time, it was one of the best cards to buy with great performance and value. The thing is, in today's cards, it gives the same performance as an RTX 3050. I've read words that describe the 3050's performance level as "abysmal". That's why I said the GTX 1070 is ancient.

I play a lot of older games and some modern such as The Witcher 3, Hitman, Metal Gear Solid 5, Valorant, Hogwarts Legacy, Hitman, Jedi Survivor, all of these games I can play on nearly max settings (except Hogwarts), so it still holds up pretty well, I'm only using 1080p.

Well in that case, you're right, that's all you really need.

Yeah I would like to replace my GPU at some point, but there's several other factors in play. Firstly I'd like to sell my old hardware after I upgrade my PC, so I need to know which component is causing the errors, or else I'm going to get a very angry customer and bad reputation.

Well the thing is, you're getting a message that points specifically to the VRAM. I'm not aware of any other PC part that would cause that specific message to be displayed. Now, I'll be the first to admit, I'm not omniscient and it could be something else but I'm a big believer in Occam's Razor which states that the simplest explanation is almost always correct so that's where I would start if I were you.

On the other hand, I also believe in trying the easiest fixes for a problem first and one possible fix (although unlikely) is that you need to update your motherboard's chipset drivers. It's something that a lot of people don't think of and it can cause a litany of seemingly unrelated issues. Like, my craptop was randomly disconnecting from an external hard drive and re-connecting less than a minute later. I initially thought that it was the cable but changing cables had no effect. Then I tried updating the chipset drivers and the problem went away both immediately and permanently. If you haven't updated your chipset drivers, you can download the package here:
AMD Chipset Driver Package for all AM4 and AM5 chipsets with Windows 10 or Windows 11

Plus I'd be experiencing bottle necks on other components so I'd have to end up upgrading my CPU and motherboard, which is going to cost a lot of money which I don't currently have at the moment. Plus I also use a custom water loop in my PC which connects through the CPU and GPU, so I'd also need another waterblock for the GPU which costs around £120-150. So it's going to get very costly if I upgrade.

You need to remember though, you're on the AM4 platform. Any upgrade you do would just include BIOS updates and dropping-in a CPU. Considering what you're using right now, you could spend £160 for an R7-5700X and it would be a colossal upgrade. I know the R7-1700 very well because that was my first Ryzen CPU back in 2017.

Curious how come you're recommending the RX series? I haven't upgraded a GPU in 5 years so I'm quite out of the loop, most people seem to have always gone for RTX / Nvidea cards in past.

Sure, but that's only because they don't know any better. A video card is not a small purchase and people feel a lot more comfortable with what's familiar to them, especially when they have to spend hundreds of dollars on it. You won't find many people who have used both for this very reason. I'm one of the few who have and so I know that the difference between a GeForce and a Radeon is about the same difference as you'd find between an Intel and AMD CPU, basically none.

I had an nVidia TNT, a GeForce FX5200, GeForce 6200 and GeForce 8500 GT. Then I started working at Tiger Direct (this was back in 2007) and I saw that nVidia was using dishonest marketing to justify charging more than Radeons. It was the same marketing that Intel used and it really rubbed me the wrong way. See, Intel and nVidia were constantly promoting the fact that they had the fastest CPU and GPU, respectively. Sure, that's a great feat but it's only relevant to people who are actually looking to buy the absolute fastest CPU or GPU. Otherwise, getting the performance you want for the best price, regardless of brand should be the goal, not having a specifically-coloured box. To put it in UK terms; "One does not buy a Vauxhall Astra just because one is impressed with the Chevrolet Corvette." but that's what people have been doing.

So, because I was working at Tiger Direct, I of course wanted to do a major PC upgrade (since I was getting stuff at cost). At the time I had a Core2Duo, 4GB of DDR and a GeForce 8500 GT. Being on the other side of the counter gave me a huge advantage however because I was able to see what the absolute best PC I could get for the amount of money I had to spend and there were no parts by Intel or nVidia in that equation.

If I had gone the Intel/nVidia route, I would've been stuck with a Core2Quad Q6600 and a GeForce 9800GTX+ at best. Since I wasn't ignorant (and therefore wasn't averse to the road less travelled), I instead ended up with an AMD Phenom II X4 940 (~Q9400) and an XFX Radeon HD 4870 1GB (~GTX 260) with 8GB of DDR2-800 and an MSi K9A2 Platinum motherboard (the motherboard turned out to be a mistake but that's another story). As expected, I was 100% satisfied with my AMD/ATi setup and marvelled at just how much better a deal I got simply by shunning Intel and nVidia. I also felt better about it because working at Tiger Direct showed me how scummy Intel and nVidia are. I had no further desire to ever support those two corporations.

Since then, my CPUs have been a Phenom II X4 965, an FX-8350, an R7-1700, R5-3600X, R7-5700X and R7-5800X3D. My gaming GPUs have been a second XFX HD 4870 for crossfire, twin Gigabyte HD 7970s in Crossfire (oh man, I miss Crossfire!), a Sapphire R9 Fury Nitro+ (and then a refurb of the same card to tinker with and try to make Crossfire work again), an XFX RX 5700 XT THICC-III, an ATi RX 6800 XT OG Reference and now I'm using an ASRock RX 7900 XTX Phantom Gaming. At no time from 2008 to today did I long for anything by Intel or nVidia. I've been 100% satisfied with my AMD/ATi rigs because I always had more performance on tap for the same (or less) money than those who only went with what was more familiar to them.

I'm happy to have a larger budget of around £500 to buy a new GPU such as a 4070 when I do upgrade.

Here's how the RTX 4070 compares to its rival, the RX 7800 XT:

Least-expensive RTX 4070 in the UK:
ASUS GeForce RTX 4070 Dual: £504
VRAM: 12GB
Average Performance = RX 7800 XT - 7%

Least-expensive RX 7800 XT in the UK:
ASRock Radeon RX 7800 XT Challenger: £500
VRAM: 16GB
Average Performance = RTX 4070 + 7%

So, what impresses you the most about the RTX 4070? Is it the fact that it's 7% slower than the RX 7800 XT on average or the fact that it has only 12GB of VRAM instead of 16GB?

It doesn't sound like such a good idea now, eh? 😉

Regardless, you're a 1080p gamer and have no reason to spend so much on a GPU. In fact, it would be an absolute waste for you because those cards are not made for 1080p, they're made for 1440p. Your best option for an upgrade would be the following items:
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X: £160
Sapphire RX 6600 Pulse 8GB: £253

Your motherboard and RAM are still quite sufficient. All you'd have to do is update your BIOS and run DDU to remove the old nVidia drivers before installing the Radeon card's drivers.

Your RAM and motherboard can remain without issue. That is without a doubt the most performance that you can get for your money spent. All you will notice is a massive increase in 1080p gaming performance, far greater than you would've achieved with either the RTX 4070 or RX 7800 XT alone. The fact that it costs £87-£91 less than either of those cards for both of these items makes it a no-brainer.

 

[ringmany]

Hi everyone,

I'm still getting my games and tabs crashing often. I was just in the middle of playing Firewatch and it crashed. I checked the error logs and I saw:

26% memory in use.
32721 MB physical memory [24151 MB free].
50721 MB paging file [2 MB free].
134217728 MB user address space [134207267 MB free]

So could it be that all of these issues with constant memory, my chrome tabs and games and discord crashing are related to the page size, and not the GPU? I only have 50GB space free on my primary SSD with the OS, so is that the issue?
I've been playing with the page size for weeks now, I keep getting suggestions on what it should be set to.

Although file explorer only shows it as 10GB, not sure why the error log is saying 50,000 MB paging file?

At the moment I have 32GB of physical RAM and I have my page size set to 10GB initial and 18GB max. I'm still rather unfamiliar with page size exactly. My primary SSD with the OS is the one with the page size and my other 2 drives have no page file size. (I install and play games on my H drive) should the size be configured on the main SSD with my OS or the gaming one? Should I leave it as system managed or just None? I tried many settings, but still get issues.

 

[NedSmelly]

Do you have a spare GPU to swap out? Literally anything, even an old crusty thing from last decade? If the problem goes away with a different GPU you pretty much have your answer. Everything else that’s been done so far is dancing around this.

This is why integrated GPUs are so valuable.

Edit: agree with @Lutfij, you really shouldn’t need to mess with the page file in Win10/11.

 

[ringmany]

Do you have a spare GPU to swap out? Literally anything, even an old crusty thing from last decade? If the problem goes away with a different GPU you pretty much have your answer. Everything else that’s been done so far is dancing around this.

This is why integrated GPUs are so valuable.

Edit: and you really shouldn’t need to mess with the page file in Win10/11.

Sadly I don't have a spare GPU at all. Plus I've got a custom waterloop that goes through my CPU and GPU, so even if I borrowed one from where, I've have to drain my entire loop, dismantle it, find my stock CPU cooler since I won't be able to hoop up the loop again, then do that until I see if the PC issues go away.

 

[NedSmelly]

This doesn’t make sense to me. You’ve been putting up with an unstable PC for 2 months but won’t set aside a few hours to dismantle for troubleshooting. Your prerogative I suppose; I would approach things differently.

Edit: and after writing this, red flags began to wave in front of me. Custom water loop. That makes it even more important to dismantle and inspect. Who knows, micro leaks causing water damage and PCB/connector corrosion. Need to eyeball the hardware.

 

[ringmany]

Hi all,
Sadly the errors are still continuing, I'm checking the event viewer logs too and getting similar errors:

Application pop-up: Windows - Out of Virtual Memory : Your system is low on virtual memory. To ensure that Windows runs properly, increase the size of your virtual memory paging file. For more information, see Help.

The Windows Error Reporting Service service terminated with the following error:
The paging file is too small for this operation to complete.

Application pop-up: WerFault.exe - Application Error : The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000012d). Click OK to close the application.

Windows successfully diagnosed a low virtual memory condition. The following programs consumed the most virtual memory: VALORANT-Win64-Shipping.exe (10572) consumed 4868161536 bytes, Telegram.exe (6480) consumed 503201792 bytes, and Discord.exe (344) consumed 451371008 bytes.

Which is still strange because my GTX 1070 should have 8gb virtual memory, plus I have 32GB physical memory, and I have my virtual memory page file size set to system managed. Those 3 resources also only seem to use around 6GB.

I'm still also experiencing errors such as all my chrome tabs closing and discord freezing and I have to open task manager to close all apps and re-open them. Those instances it doesn't give me an error message of warnings. Just either freeze randomly or they close. Every day, sometimes several.

I even left memory performance tab open for hours while playing and it never went about 28% usage.

I did a full virus scan (again) only found 1 issue, removed it. I even followed a guide on how to find and fix memory leaks, didn't I couldn't find anything from the instructions

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W381C8XHjAA

 

[kerberos_20]

Application pop-up: Windows - Out of Virtual Memory : Your system is low on virtual memory. To ensure that Windows runs properly, increase the size of your virtual memory paging file. For more information, see Help.

this error message is normal when the computer has the virtual memory set to a custom size that is too small and the amount of memory being requested by software programs exceeds that amount.

Which is still strange because my GTX 1070 should have 8gb virtual memory, plus I have 32GB physical memory, and I have my virtual memory page file size set to system managed.

well since your gpu has 8gigs, than about same amount of VRAM utilisation is reserved by game in RAM just for gpu copy stuffs + whatever extra game needs for itself + older data from previous frames, so during gaming you do have less ram available

32gig ram is okay..so just reconfigure your pagefile settings a little bit
set your C drive with custom size 4GB pagefile for both min/max settings, then on your 3TB slowpoke drive (drive E) put system managed pagefile, reboot and that should do it

now even if game/chrome puts something on your slow E drive...you wont notice it performance wise as that would be just loading from some old content, you do need pagefile on C as windows needs it for kernel reports, but you should extend it on other drives if you running low on C drive space
windows doesnt use your ram fully, whenever it can it throws away old content into pagefile to make up room for which ever next app you gonna launch..so to speak..page file is just for garbage collection (as long you have enough real ram)

 

[kerberos_20]

on a second note, you should also check this setting:
open local security policy
inside navigate to this location:
security settings -> local policies -> user rights assignment -> lock pages in memory
doubleclick on lock pages and check if your account has privileges to it, if not, add your account there then either reboot or log off/log on for it to take effect

description of this setting:

Lock pages in memory

This security setting determines which accounts can use a process to keep data in physical memory, which prevents the system from paging the data to virtual memory on disk. Exercising this privilege could significantly affect system performance by decreasing the amount of available random access memory (RAM).

Default: None.

this setting is hidden on windows home edition, but dont worry, here is a guide which works on windows home aswell
http://awesomeprojectsxyz.blogspot.com/2017/11/windows-10-home-how-to-enable-lock.html

 

[ringmany]

I think I may have finally found the issue!!!

I believe it was a bitcoin miner on my PC. Already did an entire virus scan twice using windows defender, and it detected a few files, but never fixed the issue, but I finally found a bitcoin miner.

While browsing other forums, someone directed me to here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PiratedGames/comments/jp71l4/beware_of_miner_unpackerexe_decompressexe/

I followed a users command guide and I found a process called unpacker via

while(1) {
>>   Ps | Sort-Object -Property CPU -Descending | Select -First 10
>>   Write-Host "output will be refreshed in 5 sec's `n `n Handles NPM(K) PM(K) WS(K) CPU(s) Id SI ProcessName"
>>   Sleep -Seconds 5

After this doing I found a process called unpacker that was secretly running that wasn't visible in task manager:

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K)     CPU(s)     Id  SI ProcessName
-------  ------    -----      -----     ------     --  -- -----------
   1188     101   144304      97156   1,378.88  14696   1 steam
  57842      15    15684       3836     617.61   1464   1 UnpackCheck

I followed the guide and I found a file inside of my AppData/Roaming/unpacker/unpackerceck.exe

It turns out that this bitcoin miner on runs when idle and hides itself whenever you open task manager. I did notice that whenever I opened task manager, my CPU usage would suddenly drop by like 30% but I assumed this was related to caching, like it just needed a few seconds to load and update itself to the current usage, not that a process was hiding itself.

I then did a full malware scan using malwarebyes and I found the unpacker in the report, which also quaranted the registery keys.

File: 32
Trojan.BitCoinMiner.TSK, C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\TASKS\UNPACKCHECK,

I couldn't delete the file, it kept saying that it was currently open in integrity, I then opened task manager, then as expected, it killed the process and then I was able to delete the file. So I deleted the file, and I quaranted any keys. According to a lot of users on the forums, they all got it from torrenting Red Dead Redemption 2, which I also did over a year ago. So yeah I probably downloaded the bitcoin miner there.

I only just deleted it now, so fingers crossed that was the cause of the issue while whole time! It will save me spending £500 on a new graphics card.