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Possible defective i7 920?

idata
Employee
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My new computer has a very strange problem in some games. There is a half second pause every 2 seconds or so. This occurs in a few games, but not all. It happens without any overclocking at all. I have hyperthreading turned off. It does this in the menu as well as in the game itself. I thought it was the video drivers but I traced it to an affinity setting problem. For some unknown reason I have to set the affinity to 3 cores or less and then I can reset it back to 4 cores and it will fix most of the problem. If I set the affinity to 1 core the problem completely goes away but of course the games run very slowly. I also found an affinity setting program and if I set it to 3 cores or less before loading the games it will also help. So it occurs when loading the games with 4 cores enabled. Most of the games it occurs in are multithreaded and shouldn't need an affinity change. Ghostbusters, DIRT, Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena and Mirror's Edge are the main multithreaded games that are at issue. I have about a dozen more multithreaded games that are fine. This is very strange to say the least. Is this a known problem? I doubt it is. I have updated my BIOS to the latest version and it had no effect on this problem. My motherboard is Gigabyte EX58-UD3R with 6 GB memory and GTX 260 SLI. I tried 10 different video drivers and the affinity setting is the only thing that affects it. This happens in XP and Windows 7. I would just keep the CPU but changing the affinity doesn't completely get rid of the problem, maybe 80-90% of it. I am about to buy a replacement to confirm that it is a CPU issue before I try to RMA the processor and I wanted to ask your opinion before I do so. Thanks

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idata
Employee
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I discoverd it to be a software conflict with a CPU monitoring program.

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