Recently my 7700 started throttling to 40-50% cpu usage when idle. I used process explorer to diagnose the exact cause of the problem, which showed me that the 40-50% was being taking up in a combination of hardware interrupts and deferred procedure calls (DPC's). This is usually a sign of malfunctioning hardware, but which piece of hardware?
All in all I have a whole bunch of stuff attached to my machine, not to mention all of the components inside it.
Eventually I came across a tool from Microsoft of all people, that logs the Hardware Interrupts and DPC timings of various system drivers.
The tool called RATT is available here
The tool logs it's data to a text file every three minutes.
After the first 3 minutes, I checked the text file to find the culprit I had been looking for. The NDIS driver. My wireless network card was tanking. I was able to confirm this by using the FN+F11 keystrokes to see if my cpu throttled down when I disabled the card. Which it did.
Anyway, I just wanted to post this as the tool will show up overlong execution times in any module, so audio, video, any cards seemed to be covered. It won't fix the problem, but it'll save you time in trying to figure out what is going wrong.
Hope it helps!
All in all I have a whole bunch of stuff attached to my machine, not to mention all of the components inside it.
Eventually I came across a tool from Microsoft of all people, that logs the Hardware Interrupts and DPC timings of various system drivers.
The tool called RATT is available here
The tool logs it's data to a text file every three minutes.
After the first 3 minutes, I checked the text file to find the culprit I had been looking for. The NDIS driver. My wireless network card was tanking. I was able to confirm this by using the FN+F11 keystrokes to see if my cpu throttled down when I disabled the card. Which it did.
Anyway, I just wanted to post this as the tool will show up overlong execution times in any module, so audio, video, any cards seemed to be covered. It won't fix the problem, but it'll save you time in trying to figure out what is going wrong.
Hope it helps!
