I am running an AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+ on a gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 mobo, ECS 8500GT GPU, 1 GB A-data 800Mhz Ram, 160 GB EIDE HDD, with Windows Vista 32-bit Home Premium Edition (don’t hate me).
I use the Vista CPU and RAM usage monitoring meters and Everest Ultimate Edition to monitor temperatures of CPU, GPU and HDD. When Im idling my CPU is bouncing around between 6% and 20% then I will run a game and it will max out my CPU to 92% to 100%. My games are now all of a sudden running at about 9-14 fps on lowest settings when before they were running at 40-50 fps on highest settings. Running firefox or any explorer window (my docs, my comp) it will jump to 70%-80%. I have tried closing all unnecessary apps before running the game too and it still runs really slow. Throughout all of this the RAM is between 50% and 65%. The temperature of my CPU never goes higher than 35 degrees. This never used to happen it just started one day.
Update: I tried replacing the GPU with a slightly older one (brand new) that I had lying around but that did nothing at all. Im thinking that my cpu is physically tweaked and I need a new one but I dont wanna replace it (been plannin an upgrade anyways), only to find out that wasnt the problem. Could it be my mobo??