Irregular CPU usage on A8N32-SLI Deluxe

[0ptional]

I scratched the back of my A8N-SLI Premium while re-installing my G4Storm Waterblock one day and started having horrible instability, which I attributed to of course, my scratch on the back of the board on the CPU-Memory leads.

I then purchased a A8N32-SLI Deluxe to replace my A8N-SLI Premium, and at first I was having trouble with cold booting but sorted that out through driver issues, and then I had trouble keeping it cool so I refilled my water cooling loop and cleaned it and everything. On a good cold boot I start at about 33C but quickly it rises to aroud 45~49C which might have been exceptable under load as I read this board runs hot due to its double SLI chipsets, but just idling in windows this is just beyond me.

So I started monitoring my CPU usage. I've always had the most recent 1.3.1 AMD dual core drivers installed on this system and I wasn't necesarrily monitoring before this happened, but now I see that the Core1 is almost always between 70% and 90% load and Core0 is always between 10% and 30% usage. Just idling in windows, I didn't have this problem on my A8N-SLI Premium that I can remember, so I'm thinking I might have a bad motherboard but am not 100% sure.

I have no overclocked settings at this point as I'm just doing a fresh build and am taking great care to make everything perfect, zip ties to move wires out of the way, clean water, clean case, well tweaked, well configured, well formatted, the works, trying to do this perfectly and don't see where I have messed up.

So is this a problem found on A8N32-SLI boards? I'm using the 1205 bios, which I installed before installing windows even, everything fresh and new was my goal on this build.

Full specs include:

Lian-li PC65-B
PC Power and Cooling "Turbo-Cool" 510 SLI (modified as modular by performance-pcs.com)
A8N32-SLI Deluxe Bios 1205
Athlon 64 X2 4800+
2 x 512MB Geil "Golden Dragon" PC3500 (DDR433) (In dual channel)
BFG Geforce 7800GTX OC (1, no SLI) (nVidia 84.21 WHQL)
Audigy 2 "Value" in the PIC slot above the 2nd 16X PCI-Express connector
2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB (In raid 0 on the NVRAID controller)
2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB (In raid 0 on the NVRAID controller)
Plextor PX-760A DVD+/- R/RW

And as for cooling:
Tygon tubing all around
Eheim 1250 Pump
Dangerden Heatercore (88 chevelle I believe?)
120mm aluminum fan on the Heatercore after it's shroud.
Swiftech G4Storm CPU waterblock
Innovatek Tank-O-Matic (modified for 3/8IN ID tubing)

In PUMP > RAD > CPU > RES> repeat, set-up.

80mm taking air out in the back and another taking air out in the top, the "Water-cooling" fan included with the A8N32-SLI Deluxe on it's mosfet/NB/SB heatpipe set-up.

That's all for system configuration. I have no problem with formatting and starting over again, would just like to pinpoint the problem to either CPU or Motherboard as those seem the most likely, with the motherboard coming out on top, I believe I will be exchanging it this afternoon and putting it together again in the same configuration. If it changes anything I'll let you guys now, but for now your opinions are greatly appreciated, thank you!

~Tyler (Optional)

 

[0ptional]

Umm, wow, I seem to have solved my problem with updating my Audigy 2's drivers. There seems to be an issue with the "SoundFont" Technology they emply which causes 100% cpu usage without a certain update, which I seemed to have skipped over.

After installing the update my temps are back down to high 30's, low 40's for windows usual stuff (which is understandable as this board "runs hot") and my CPU usage is between 1 and 5% doing the same stuff I was normally getting 70-100% for.

Interesting development, sound card, hmm.

Thanks for allowing me to troubleshoot my own problem by thinking out loud about my components in the above post, it caused me to triple check all my drivers and found that issue on the creative site.