P2665, 250,000 steps - 50% utilization?

[zero2dash]

Wondering what the deal is here..possibly a bad WU or something? (going off of a rough google search that's one possibility I've found)

A1 core WU
P2665 (R0, C551, G183)
250,000 steps (I've seen the info about a 350,000 step P2665 folding slow, but this is a 250k step one)

-Only getting about 50% core use across all 4 cores (on my q9450 @ 3.6ghz..running EVGA VM with the -smp 4 flag, 1gb of ram allocated to it)
-"Extra SSE boost" is in the logfile so it's not that.
-The VM config is set to 4 processors still.
-I've shutdown the VM and restarted it, still have the same issue.

TPF is about 10 minutes.

This system (rig #2 of mine) has nothing that has changed...the previous WU's all ran fine (100% utilization). I have no background apps or anything taking cpu cycles, and it's not my gpu client running at the same time either (I've checked).

Any ideas - anyone?
TIA

 

[capreppy]

A1 cores don't scale well and I have seen this behavior before. I got one on my i7 and it was utilizing 25%

 

[T4rd]

Yup, it's just the A1 WUs. I would get those occasionally with notfreds. Now that I run -bigadv though, I don't have that prob anymore .