/me refrains from the obvious L2 joke

Actually, you can burn out a PC running at 100% for long periods of time if either of these conditions are true:


1) You are overclocking your CPU


2) You have insufficient cooling on the CPU and mainboard chipsets (particularly the northbridge.)


Factory cooling for budget PC's are notorious, higher end generally okay.


In any case, I am not seeing my CPU at 100% while playing AC, more like 40%, which is ~5% higher than last month.

I've never seen AC run under 100% cpu usage while it's the active window... with or without Decal running. I always run AC in windowed @ max graphics and res. Even when I turn all the graphic settings/resolution all the way down I still get 100%.


My PC is an AMD 64 3000 (slightly oc'd, only to 2ghz), 1gig 3200 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 vid. My PC never gets above normal temps (~120F) with a Thermaltak HSF. Even when I was running a AMD K7 2600 oc'd to 2800 with a Zelman Copper Flower HSF I was getting 100% CPU and lower than normal temps.


All I know is since I've started watching CPU usage (about a year now) with 2 PCs, its never dropped under 100% unless I alt-tab to another window... I can also run dual clients all day long with no problem, heat or otherwise.


*shrug* who knows?

 

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Under Config Screen in AC, under Graphics Options, I checked on Sync with Refresh Rate, seems to fix my problem at least. Someone on Decal boards suggested this.

I've always had that since ToD with no change on my side... After posting yesterday I tried to go into full screen mode to see if there was any change and there was........ CPU when to around 85-95%.

 

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When it's the active window mine often uses between 75-100% CPU. Inactive it uses much, much less. It's not really a big deal if your case & CPU have decent cooling, and by that I don't mean water-cooling or anything extravagant. Modern CPU fans are usually controlled through the motherboard and spin faster when the CPU is under a heavier load. It's really nothing to worry about, your CPU isn't going to melt under a full load. I've run a program for a few years (Folding@Home, same as Zxoltar) that uses all available CPU cycles so my CPU is always at 100% load and haven't had any adverse effects.


That's not to say that the AC client couldn't use some major optimization, though.

There must ahve been at least 3 posts about ATI cards using outrageous system resources this week.

 

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Just as a note, PCs are always at 100% CPU utilization. The CPU can not stop, so it always doing something.


When you look at CPU utilization, you are trying what percentage of the time the CPU is doing useful (or supposely useful) work. You want your PC to spend perhaps 10% minimium CPU time running the System Idle Process. That gives your PC the ability respond quickly to demands from the various tasks on your PC.


When the System Idle Process drops to 1 or 0%, then your PC is overloaded trying to do everything you asked and can not keep up. This is not good. It will not burn out your PC though assuming that the cooling fans and air flow adequate.


The only reason for bringing the possibility of a heat issue up is that System Idle Process does not put much of a load on your graphics card. If you have a heavy graphics application (e.g. a game) driving your video card and floating point processing real hard you might run into a heat issue. However, this heat issue going to bite you eventually anyway.

Lower your refresh rate.