Over the top CPU usage and slow PC performance

[thetylero]

My i7 4770k @3.5 GHz has been acting strange since i upgraded the motherboard recently. When I start up my machine, the usage is hovering around 100% and -rarely- drops below 50%. Windows is laggy, I can't play games and the whole system just seems to run very slow.

This also only doesn't happen every time I boot up the machine...only some of the times.

Hope someone can help me resolve this.

 

[synphul]

What motherboard did you upgrade to? Also, did you do a clean install of windows when you swapped motherboards? It might be worth checking out windows task manager to try and determine what's using the cpu so heavily. The processes tab should show this.

 

[thetylero]

What motherboard did you upgrade to? Also, did you do a clean install of windows when you swapped motherboards? It might be worth checking out windows task manager to try and determine what's using the cpu so heavily. The processes tab should show this.

I upgraded to a MSI Z97 Gaming 7.

And yes, I had to reinstall W8.1 and then reupgrade to W10. I have the correct drivers for everything, I know that. And the tskmngr never seems to show me what is using ALL of my cpu. Usually it says one is using 3% another is using 2% and another with 5% and then the rest are fractional. It's getting frustrating because it is making my system run slower, I think.

Programs and games open very slowly and seem to feel very laggy when im using them. They can be unresponsive and I have to just wait for them to respond or they can just lag around. Before I upgraded to this board, my PC was blazing fast. This board was like 3x the price of the other I had before and is supposed to be better, in theory.

 

[synphul]

Win10 has given several people troubles of varying degree. It could be new processes that didn't exist in win8.1 (like cortana assistant), background updates, indexing of the hard drive. It's doubtful that the motherboard itself is causing the issues. More likely that it's software and if something is accessing your hard drive quite a bit (such as indexing) it can definitely make the entire system feel sluggish.

Was the sluggishness noticeable on windows 8.1 also? Or just since upgrading to win10? I'm assuming you were on win8.1 before the motherboard upgrade, then when installing the new motherboard and reinstalling 8.1 you loaded 8.1 and went right on to upgrading to win10. Task manager should show all the processes using the cpu and they should total the amount used. So if as you say one is using 3%, another 2% and 5% and the rest are fractional, I'd assume cpu usage at that moment would be around 15% usage (10% by the main processes and factoring the additional up to be a bit extra). It wouldn't mesh if this were the case and cpu usage was 40-50%. Maybe try clicking on the details tab under task manager then clicking the header that says 'cpu' to sort them by highest to least usage.

This was for win8 though hopefully will also apply to win10 in terms of disabling superfetch/prefetch.
http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/disable-superfetch-prefetch-windows-8/

 

[thetylero]

Win10 has given several people troubles of varying degree. It could be new processes that didn't exist in win8.1 (like cortana assistant), background updates, indexing of the hard drive. It's doubtful that the motherboard itself is causing the issues. More likely that it's software and if something is accessing your hard drive quite a bit (such as indexing) it can definitely make the entire system feel sluggish.

Was the sluggishness noticeable on windows 8.1 also? Or just since upgrading to win10? I'm assuming you were on win8.1 before the motherboard upgrade, then when installing the new motherboard and reinstalling 8.1 you loaded 8.1 and went right on to upgrading to win10. Task manager should show all the processes using the cpu and they should total the amount used. So if as you say one is using 3%, another 2% and 5% and the rest are fractional, I'd assume cpu usage at that moment would be around 15% usage (10% by the main processes and factoring the additional up to be a bit extra). It wouldn't mesh if this were the case and cpu usage was 40-50%. Maybe try clicking on the details tab under task manager then clicking the header that says 'cpu' to sort them by highest to least usage.

This was for win8 though hopefully will also apply to win10 in terms of disabling superfetch/prefetch.
http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/disable-superfetch-prefetch-windows-8/

Okay, I disabled superfetch/prefetch.

Now my main problem seems to be that my GPU is not kicking in and doing anything for me.

When I start up a game and try to play, I can't top more than 10 FPS and the GPU usage/temp levels don't move AT ALL while im in the game.
I'm not sure if you can help me with this problem, but i think it might be affecting this situation.

ALSO(I forgot to answer this)

No, nothing was sluggish when I was using 8.1. Everything worked great.

and to clarify

I had 8.1 on the old board, upgraded to W10
Installed new board, W10 said it was no longer activated
Contact Microsoft, they say I need to clean install W8.1 again, then reupgrade to W10 to fix my problem.
I do all of this, and now I am here. Slow performance, CPU going crazy, GPU not wanting to do anything...

This whole situation is a nightmare that I have been working on for almost a week now.

 

[synphul]

Have you installed all the latest drivers for your gpu? Not just the ones that came with it, but the latest released drivers from nvidia. I'm thinking it's some sort of conflict between the gpu drivers and windows, seems odd the gpu isn't doing much of anything. The games you're playing, were they reinstalled fresh after windows 10 was loaded along with any updates they may need? Or were they just transferred over from a previous installation?

 

[thetylero]

The drives that the games were stored on were not connected during any of the installations of the new windows. I even reinstalled the newest drivers from Nvidia directly, because i thought that might be the issue...but apparently it isn't. Do you think that I should freshly install all of my games?

 

[synphul]

It might not hurt. Sometimes game files can become corrupt and a fresh reinstall can fix the issue. Most games that go through uplay or steam save progress online so that bit shouldn't be lost.