Why does my CPU spike to high levels?

[CrisHates1]

can someone tell me why my audio keeps cutting up and when it does the cpu usage spikes a little bit or vice versa (or in general like me scrolling up and down in discord chat then cpu spikes up)

 

Power Supply: EVGA 550 Watt

CPU: AMD Fx-8370

GPU: GTX 660 2Gb

Ram: 16 gbs

Motherboard: M5a78l-M Plus/USB3

Case: FBM-06 Micro ATX Mini Tower

[da na]

Are you using your onboard motherboard sound or the GPU audio? I assume motherboard sound.

That happens on my FX 9 series machine. AFAIK that is just an issue with that series of Conexant audio chips. The CPU handles most of the audio processing and when it has other things to do it can't do audio processing as smoothly. If it really bothers you get a cheap Sound Blaster card from eBay.

[CrisHates1]

Just now, Mel0nMan said:

Are you using your onboard motherboard sound or the GPU audio? I assume motherboard sound.

That happens on my FX 9 series machine. AFAIK that is just an issue with that series of Conexant audio chips. The CPU handles most of the audio processing and when it has other things to do it can't do audio processing as smoothly. If it really bothers you get a cheap Sound Blaster card from eBay.

Yea but it wasnt doing this before, the audio only went choppy because I cleaned the GPU paste and put a new one on, you think that might be the problem? Also what about when i'm scrolling or playing games and its also lagging because it didn't do that before

[da na]

3 minutes ago, CrisHates1 said:

Yea but it wasnt doing this before, the audio only went choppy because I cleaned the GPU paste and put a new one on, you think that might be the problem? Also what about when i'm scrolling or playing games and its also lagging because it didn't do that before

That could definitely be an issue, but the paste isn't the issue. Just check that everything is seated correctly. Reseat your GPU, RAM, clean out the slots.

[CrisHates1]

1 minute ago, Mel0nMan said:

That could definitely be an issue, but the paste isn't the issue. Just check that everything is seated correctly. Reseat your GPU, RAM, clean out the slots.

Do you think the problem could also be because of the CPU because of the high spikes?

[da na]

1 minute ago, CrisHates1 said:

Do you think the problem could also be because of the CPU because of the high spikes?

Other than FX chips being a bit on the weak side nowadays, there's nothing physically wrong with the CPU.

[CrisHates1]

2 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Other than FX chips being a bit on the weak side nowadays, there's nothing physically wrong with the CPU.

So the sudden spikes when im doing something like listening to music or alt tabbing is not the CPU fault?

[da na]

1 minute ago, CrisHates1 said:

So the sudden spikes when im doing something like listening to music or alt tabbing is not the CPU fault?

It is the CPU's fault but doesn't indicate that the CPU is broken pretty much.

Alt tabbing is an action that needs a bit of CPU usage to be smooth. And the listening to music... depending on what you're using, it could be the spike of loading something from the drive/Internet, or a background process starting.