I just built my new machine about a week ago and it was runnin fine until about 3 days ago. Sometimes when it's idling, the processor will be idling between 47 and 50. never any lower or higher than the two. I can't figure the shit out, i figured it was a virus or spyware so i did a quick reformat after i realized AVG or Adware was pickin anything up and it still does it. can anyone help?

Specs:
Sigma Phantom case
Asus M3A Mobo
AMD Dual-core 3.0Ghz 64Bit
4GB OCZ DDR2 Ram
Nvidia 8900 GTX 512MB

What os?

$50 on vista!

Didn't even F*CKING thing of that shit

The reason its 50%ish percent is that that is equal to 100% of one core of your two core processor. It probably means that you have some background process like an anti-virus scanner that is using an entire core to do its business.

I'm running Windows XP Pro of course, and I don't think one process could be using an entire core because when it's up at 50% it's running dog ass slow and I've even brought it down to the bare bone processes just to see and it still sits at 47 to 50. lately it's even been jumping to 95-100. I'm thinking it could be a bad core?

does your task manager show any processes using that much CPU?

Fire it up in safe mode. See if it still does it there. Also, check task manager as whats his face said.

Unlikely, a bad core should crash the computer. Try booting the computer off of a linux CD. Once the system is booted, check the system monitor and see if the processor is still at a high number. What do you mean by a "quick" reformat? FYI, don't have the network cable connected when reformatting. There's a chance your computer can get infected between when windows is done installing and before you can turn on the firewall. I learned this the hard way.

I have come a bit closer to figuring this shit out, it only does it on certain reboots. Example: three days ago i turned my pc on and it was doing it, so i shutdown for about a half-hour and then rebooted and it was fine even til this second and that was three days ago. so it's something that goes on during boot-up.

so I dont know why it does that or even if i explained it well enough, but i have 10 more days on my warranty for some hardware and i need to get it figured out.