CPU Utilization doesn't go above 51%

[ahakobyan]

Building a NAS with following mobo and cpu:

Motherboard: DQ77KB
CPU: i5-3570S (tested, passed)

I have 8 gb ram installed (tested, passed).

The problem is, CPU utilization does not go above 51%, no matter what I do.
Windows power settings are all good, all set to 100% max.
Checked BIOS (latest version) didn't find anything there for CPU limitation.

Please help figure this out.

I had an older CPU, which I installed for test, and that one didn't go above 55%.

[Thandor]

Your CPU also runs at only 1.55GHz rather than 3.1GHz.

You mentioned that you have set the Windows Power options to 100%. Did you also try just setting it to the default 'High performance' profile?

Did you install all the drivers for the motherboard? Especially the Intel Chipset software is important but often forgotten.

[H3nrik V!]

Could you try having task manager showing logical CPUs rather than one graph showing all cores alltogether? Would be interesting to see if all cores run ~50'% or only half of the cores are actually being utilized ..

[crazybubba64]

Did you upgrade your processor recently?

Windows sometimes acts odd when you swap similar processors.

Go into device manager and uninstall your processor. Reboot and see if anything improves.

[Mixeur]

one application at least is locking 2 cores @ 100%.
Check in the processes tab and order them by "Cpu".
You'll find out then if this is normal or not according to what the computer is supposed to do...

[Elar]

You can also try to reset Management Engine configuration by MEBX reset header. Procedure described on page 71 in DQ77KB Technical Product Specification:
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/motherboards/desktop/dq77kb/dq77kb_techprodspec08.pdf

[misace]

Try run Hwinfo utility, to see if something with change.

https://www.hwinfo.com/

Run benchmark and compare results with same or similar CPU (simple benchmark is in CPU-z utility). Sometimes taskmanager shows bad frequency. I have similar problems with my server, taskmanager shows 0% usage whatever I run, HP simply says: this edition of Windows is not supported.