Asus Essentio - CPU problem?

[nik_newland]

Hi all, hope i'm in the right forum!

Today I bought an Asus Essentio to use as a Media PC and I'm having a few problems.

When I got home I loaded all of my music into iTunes and started listening to a few tracks. I noticed straight away that every now and then the music would crackle and stutter. I put it down to a problem with iTunes so I uninstalled it and loaded all of my music and vids into Media Centre to see if it would make a difference. Same problem.

I thought it might be a driver issue so I uninstalled and updated the drivers for the onboard sound card (Realtek) I'm using. That didn't make a difference so I uninstalled the Realtek drivers completely and used the stock Windows HD Audio drivers. No improvements after that either.

I loaded up Windows Task Manager to see if anything unusual was going on with the CPU or Memory while the music was playing. It appears that the crackles and stuttersin the music/videos occur at the same time that large spikes of CPU usage show up in Task Manager.


You can see the spikes here.

So i stopped the music and just left a minimal ammount of non-resource hungry programs running to see what would happen in Task Manager and the spikes in CPU usage still occurred.

Is this a problem with the CPU or some sort of application I'm using? I don't understand why the CPU is working so hard, so frequently without anything running.Remember that I only got this computer today so all I've really installed is Mozilla software and divx codecs.

One other thing I've just noticed is that if i turn the onboard sound off completely in the BIOS and then try and watch a 1080p trailer from Apple without sound, the CPU power spikes cause the video to stutter.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Cheers,
Nik

 

[Peter.Cort]

in dealing with the br playback, intel/nvidia have a hard time giving fluid playback due to the fact that the cpu does all the decoding, rather than on an amd/ati solution the gfx card does some decoding letting the cpu do other stuff. so basically intel (depending on your processor) will stutter on bluray playback. as for the sound, eliminate background programs and such that you don't need while playing back movies and music.

also does the cpu throttle itself down when not under load?

 

[nik_newland]

in dealing with the br playback, intel/nvidia have a hard time giving fluid playback due to the fact that the cpu does all the decoding, rather than on an amd/ati solution the gfx card does some decoding letting the cpu do other stuff. so basically intel (depending on your processor) will stutter on bluray playback. as for the sound, eliminate background programs and such that you don't need while playing back movies and music.

also does the cpu throttle itself down when not under load?

Cheers man.

I'm not actually playing BR's just watching 1080p trailers off the Apple website but in saying that, the exact same problem occurs when I'm watching an ordinary divx file in Media Centre. The CPU spikes in power and everything stutters.

I've pretty much removed every program from the computer and it doesn't seem to make a difference, the CPU still spikes.

I'm not sure what you mean by throttling itself down??

 

[patonb]

Could it be Vista doing that initial archiving thing?

I was under the assumption that vista was resource heavy the first week, than all was fine.

Throttle is when the cpu lowers its speed to save power when the load is low.

 

[Peter.Cort]

ok, so if you aren't playing blu-ray's then its just an issue with the cpu spiking, and its effecting everything in terms of playback. i would monitor task manager and see what it is thats taking up cpu power, and if its windows explorer thats using it, then its just vista, and i would take patonb's advice and let it chill and see if it gets better. if not, post back.

 

[KSoD]

Turn off indexing. Also make sure that no software from Asus is on there. Also make sure to get the Firefox Ultimate Optimizer to keep Firefox under control. I see you had Firefox open. Firefox is known to get CPU and Memory spikes from time to time. The Optimizer will help keep it under control.

 

[nik_newland]

Thanks for your replies guys.

I've got the Ultimate Optimizer for Firefox so I'll see how that goes. I assum by Indexing you mean the Windows option you can turn on and off in Add/Remove Programs? If so, that was already off.. If you mean something else could you let me know??

Thanks again fellas.

 

[KSoD]

Disable and Turn Off Windows Vista Search Indexer and Indexing Service My Digital Life

The search indexer.

 

[nik_newland]

Cheers for the link mate, very informative. I'll give it a shot and report back!

 

[nik_newland]

Mmm.. still got the same problem, it's not as hardcore now as it was though still very annoying... Could this just be a Vista compatability issue or something like that?