Hey all, I just set up a new computer with an AMD A10-7870K CPU. Everything is running well and doing stress tests with Prime 95 everything works as it should.

But when I run SETI or WCG I only get between 20 - 80% CPU usage and the elapsed time is slow. I'm not sure if these two things are related or not and have no clue on what's causing it.

I tried a few GPU tasks and those seem to run as they should.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

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Make sure your Use at most N% of CPU time preference is set to 100%.

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I should have mentioned that I did check to make sure use CPU's and CPU Time are both set to 100%.

But where did you check and set these? There are two places you can set them, aside from 'locations' (default, home, work, school).

On line preferences?
Or BOINC Manager(->Advanced view->)Tools->Computing preferences.
If set at the latter, these override the preferences from the web site. So when you next go edit the web-preferences, BOINC will still be using the local preferences, until you either edit those as well, or clear them.

Also, make sure settings are really at 100%, not at zero, because of a bug in 7.4.42 which thinks zero isn't 'no limitation', but really zero.

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I checked them on the website and haven't changed them in the client so the client is still pulling prefs from the web.

And they are both set to 100% and not 0.

And thanks for trying to help Ageless! :)

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You're not saying what you run and we can't check with your computers hidden.
There are Astropulse tasks available, these take quite a long time on a CPU. Multiple hours.

Then there are various Multibeam tasks, where it depends on the angle range that the task is recorded at how long the task takes. VHARs (very high angle range) run fast, VLARs (very low angle range) run slow, anything in between depends on the angle.

And not all take 100% CPU all the time.

Are you using the built-in R7 for calculations? Only Multibeam, or also Astropulse? Stock applications, or Lunatics?

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Ok, this is strange. The only change from when I last ran BOINC to now is that I was playing around with overclocking the CPU and have it running at 4.5GHz currently.

Everything is now running as it should. It must have been something in the BIOS or a power setting that's now disabled or I have no idea. But that managed to somehow fix it.

I'll file this one as too crazy to try and take the time to figure out exactly what went wrong. I've been building my own computers for 15 years now and this is truly the strangest thing I've run into.

All the tasks I tried were MB tasks. Stock apps on Windows 8.1 64bit. I did also try WCG and had the same issues with 3 of their sub projects that I got tasks for. I have uninstalled and re-installed BOINC a number of times as well.

I do understand that tasks can take a while and don't always use 100% CPU. But I've never seen 4 tasks sit between 20-50% with spikes to about 80%. This is looking at all 4 cores in Windows Task Manager, so that's like 5-12% on average per core/task.

The strangest part to me is that I ran the tasks for about an hour and the run time only went up to about 13 minutes. It's like BOINC is running in slow motion.

As for the GPU tasks, I ran some on both the integrated chip and a R9 270x. I also suspended all GPU tasks to make sure they weren't messing with the CPU tasks somehow but there was no change. I also tried suspending tasks and running just 1 task, 2 tasks, etc. And had no change, one task was running at about 5-15% in Task Manager.

This is one of the oddest things I've had happen over the years.