I just purchased a machine from iBuyPower, containing the Gigabyte GA-F2A88X-UP4 motherboard.
I am using Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bit.
I noticed at first power-up, that the machine was running at 25% CPU usage all the time.
According to Task Manager, the process that was using the CPU was "NT Kernel & System".
After doing further research, I used Process Explorer to look at this process further, and found that a driver called XHCDRV.SYS was the driver that was actually generating this usage.
To confirm this, I disabled the driver using Autoruns, then rebooted, and that solved the CPU usage issue.
However, of course, xhcdrv.sys is the driver for the Via VL805 USB 3.0 Host driver, and without it, all of my USB3 connectors are now disabled.
I tried re-installing the driver, but Windows says my installed driver is the newest available.
So what options do I have now? I'm going to re-install the driver, since tying up one core doesn't affect performance all that much, but it wastes power, and it keeps all four cores in Turbo mode, which also wastes power.
Is there some way to fix the CPU-utilization issue with this driver?
