Asus G50V-A2 100% CPU Load at All Times

[Alarien]

Anyone else seen something like this?

Have the Asus G50V-A2, stock specs. Got it in and set it to raid 0 and reinstalled the OS from the recovery disk and all drivers. Things seemed ok until I realized that about 75% of the times that I turned the laptop on, the CPU would be running at 80%-100% (100% max frequency) at all times.

Vista Indexing, Windows Search, and all the little idle processes were disabled. I checked the performance monitor, downloaded xperf, and ran through the processes and no specific issue could be found except that the System (Kernal) process was constantly running between 50-70% of the CPU at all times (Not the System Idle Process). I tried to isolate a driver, but was not able to do so.

Tried reinstalling Vista again, non-raid. No change.

Gave up and attempted to install XP Home, thinking "Vista problem?" No joy. Even under a clean, formatted XP installation with all proper drivers, the CPU again runs at 80-100% load while "idle." On top of that, when in XP, I get a message of "Power Surge on USB Port" stating "USB item has malfunctioned and is drawing too much power." There was nothing plugged into the USB.

(Just as a note, a friend of mine has the G50VM-X1 from Best Buy and he can't run more than a mouse and keyboard off the USB without running out of power... not sure if there is a general issue with the USB ports on this board).

Anyway, anyone seen anything like this before? Sounds to me like a motherboard level hardware error. After spending an extra $100 for another copy of XP, I'm about done trying and ready to give up and RMA this computer, and now I'm scared that if I get the same thing, it'll have exactly the same issues. Anyone gone back and forth from stock config to raid or back and found no issues with CPU load?

Seriously thinking about giving up on the G50 and considering the Sager NP5796.

[Justin@XoticPC]

It sounds like there is some process that has to be running in your back ground. Any Anti Virus Running? I am personally running another system (G70) and have Raid Active and no large CPU loads.

When monitoring the processes do you notice (have them sorted by CPU Usage High to low) anything coming in and utilizing the CPU? It sounds very much like it is indexing?

[Alarien]

No process that I can figure out. I pulled up task manager, resource monitor, pulled up xperf and the viewer for it as well and did this all on a completely *clean* install of both Vista and XP. The only thing that I had installed were the included drivers (or the downloaded drivers for XP). No antivirus at all (did not install the Norton trial), no malware checker, nothing that would work in the background generally.

Resource monitor shows *only* the System (Kernal) process (not the idle process) running at 50-70 CPU load consistently and without any real discernable reason. And yes, I did keep that sorted by CPU load. It was System 50-70 and the rest at 2 or less consistently.

I also made sure that I disabled indexing for both drives AND turned off the process in the services.msc and also turned off fetching, task scheduling, auto-defrag scheduling, etc. And, if it was indexing, it should have stopped when I went to full screen games, but when I did have Portal/Bioshock installed at one point, it was still running high and causing the games to stutter about every 20 feet.

That's the frustration, it's consistent through 4 different installs/configurations on the machine. It's intermittent, in that it'll not happen for about 30-40 minutes, but on the next boot it will stay that way for hours, regardless of downtime, and then there was that nagging USB power error under XP, which is just a little scary.

[Alarien]

Ah, I didn't mention, that when I got the more descriptive tools to look into the Kernal processes, it showed that roughly half of the load that the System process was using was due to Deferred Procedure Calls.

[Justin@XoticPC]

It sounds very strange. I would recommend getting in contact with Support at 1-888-678-3688 and see if they have any additional ideas?

[Alarien]

Support demanded I flash the BIOS first. Which I did, then after following the process, Windows began crashing at boot. After realizing that I needed to set the BIOS back to compatible (last install) from Enhanced (BIOS reset), the crashes went away.

However, now I have another weird error, second time I've heard of this on the G50 series. The BIOS now run *twice* at start up. (???) I've hit ESC to force it to show the post and allow me to select the boot device, but now when I get to the boot device for the first time, it starts back over at POST again. So, if you do nothing, the Republic of Gamers logo runs twice.

However, since then, I have not been able to replicate the CPU load issue after multiple restarts, will keep watching it. I thought for a few minutes it was back, so I went to download CPU-Z and by the time I came back to run it, the load had dropped down to 3-4%, which is the first time it's dropped from high to low on it's own.

[Alarien]

Yep, it's back, and now with Double Post. This machine is pretty much a walking ball of errors, from my guess. It appears that these issues are not replicated on other G50s, so it appears it must be a hardware issue on this one.

[Brad@XoticPC]

Hi Alarien - just making sure, but you haven't installed Power 4 Gear, have you? (Especially with XP, I could foresee that causing some weird problems...)

[Alarien]

No, no power program was installed on XP before the problem was manifest.

[rugbycanada]

Sorry I don't possess the knowledge to help and I don't want to hijack your thread but I just wanted to ask... Isn't this a problem that should have revealed itself to the techs @ Xotic during the burn in and benchmarks phase?
I ask because I don't have the knowledge that you do to even notice a problem like that occurring in the first place and I worry it would be too late by the time I did.
One of the main reasons I'm purchasing from Xotic is this "extra level" of quality control on the notebooks they sell during this phase and the other being the tech support.