Hello! I have monitored my GPU with TechPowerUp’s GPU-Z and also with Precision X1. I have a 3080 FTW3 ULTRA Gaming from EVGA. What’s extremely odd that sometimes, the GPU starts drawing extreme power (350-400 watts) What is extremely more weird is that if I launch task manager then power usage goes down to 120 watts but that’s still high at idle for 2% GPU usage. I have two displays, both 1080p one of them being 240hz. Sometimes but it’s very rare the GPU power draw goes down to 45 watts, but I’ve only seen that rarely happen… Restarts don’t help and I’ve also tried DDU and NVCleaninstall… I’ve also tried setting the power settings to normal in the Nvidia CP and have tried to set the windows power settings to normal as well…
I think DWM.exe was doing that for me for a few days it was fixed with some combination of software updates but the immediate fix was to turn off Hardware accelerated GPU Scheduler
I have tried your advice, and when I launched the PC instant 100% GPU load and 100% GPU power draw what’s weird though is that if I start task manager it goes down to 3% load and also 120 watts usage?
My first thought was a malware ecoin miner that is programmed to suspend when it sees Task Manager active. Can’t think of any other cause that can match those symptoms. Have you added any programs lately?
Sysinternals Process Explorer is a Task Manager alternate.
If you see the same behavior try these alternatives to see which process is being naughty.
I use virustotal.com to scan everything I download before I install, regardless of origin. If you still have downloaded software you installed lately, run it through there as a sanity check. It’s free and has saved me quite a few times. It also ties in with Glasswire if you want to spend a few bucks to monitor your network usage in real time.
(Disclosure: I paid for Glasswire with my own money. I am not otherwise affiliated with them in any way. My opinion is my own.)
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I was afraid of this. I thought so too at first but haven’t really made up a plan in my head to confirm this. I mean I could’ve just ran a malwarebytes scan ( what I did ) . Either way I did download process hacker, nothing really happened, same outcome as when I launched task manager. After I ran process explorer though is when I got this kinda confirmed because the power draw stayed the same at 350 watts. Nonetheless it was weird because none of the processes seemed to have been using the GPU except iCue but that was using 5% only, nonetheless malwarebyte detected 3000 counts of malware (mostly bitcoin miners) in my registry and in between the system files. I still have an idle power usage of 100 watts , which is still a bit concerning? But much better! Thank you for your help :)))) ever so much
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No worries, glad to help.
Malwarebytes is a good program. I always run a layered defense because not everything is perfect and programs miss things on occasion. VirusTotal is a god send for preemptively checking downloads before installation. Glasswire is a decent program that ties in with Windows Defender and you can block things from your network with a click if you see suspicious connections.
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