CorsairLink High CPU Usage

I am running the latest version of the CorsairLink program (4.6.0.86) and I am very disappointed regarding just how much CPU that it is always using. CorsairLink4.Service.exe is averaging about 3% CPU usage at all times. On top of that, is CorsairLink4.exe is using an additional ~0.25% CPU at all times. I am running a Skylake Intel Core i7-6700K @ 4.7GHz with the H110i. This amount of CPU usage is rather ridiculous.

 

I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the program. I have tried an old method that I found on these forums of uninstalling the software and trying to retain my fan curve, however, that did not work. Uninstalling the software will leave me with no fan curve at all. I either want this program to use less than 0.5% CPU as it should be, or to be able to have a fan curve without it. Failing that, I would like to know if reverting to an older version of the software might be a good idea to lessen the high CPU usage by this program.

 

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

If you use CL4 there is not a lot you can do. 3% of 8 CPUs is 24% of a CPU which is way more than should be needed. On my 24 CPU system the service alone uses almost 60% of a CPU and when I connect all my test hardware this goes up to almost 100% :eek:. CL 4.6.0.86 also causes my CPUs to speed up from 1.20 GHz to 3.10 GHz :(:.

 

As far as I can tell Corsair think this is OK and there are also issues with Corsair Link that have not been addressed after over 2 years.

 

I felt I could do better myself, so I did and no longer use Corsair Link to control my CL hardware.

 

Yikes... thank you for the quick informative reply. I wish I had done more research before purchasing this product now. It seems so counter productive to buy a more expensive cooler to get "just a little more OC" when that little more just gets eaten up by the software designed for that hardware anyways. :rolleyes:

 

Are all older versions just as bad at the latest? If they use less CPU, would it still be okay/safe to switch them? Curious, how did you mange to control your hardware without the CLink software?

You are far from the first to wish they had done more research, but at least you got the CoolIT H110i rather than a silly Asetek cooler.

 

• See http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?p=796027 for why you should get a CoolIT H110i :nodding: rather than an Asetek H115i :(:.

 

AFAIK CL4 uses about 30% more CPU than CL3, but CL3 has other issues and will not support recent hardware at all.

 

Initially I read http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?p=663107 then implemented the protocol and over the years have looked at USB traces to improve the support and add support for non-CoolIT hardware.

I have tried an old method that I found on these forums of uninstalling the software and trying to retain my fan curve, however, that did not work.

Not sure what "old method" you tried that didn't work... but in the CL software, at least when using a "v2" unit, there's an option to save the current fan/pump profile to the hardware. At that point, CL (including the service) doesn't seem to need to run anymore. (At least it appeared to work for me when I was dual-booted into linux.)

He wrote his own software called SIV, which is a very good diagnostic tool and can also be used to control Corsair hardware, that's the screen shown in Rays first post.

Thanks everyone. I'm looking at the SIV Guide right now and the program looks very interesting! I will give it a shot setting it up later tonight and report back tomorrow with how it goes. Thanks for writing this software, red-ray!

I will give it a shot setting it up later tonight and report back tomorrow with how it goes.

 

I just checked and I added full Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7 support some time ago, so SIV should do OK.

 

If you look at [sTC Info] (Menu->Edit->View STC Info) this will report all the SIV per Thread Context information and I would be interested to see how much CPU time SIV uses and how long the threads take to do the updates.

 

On my system SIV has been running for about 22 hours, I get as below with most of the CPU being down to me having 4 x GTX 980 and NVidia NVAPI using a rather a lot of CPU time (see the GPUs thread). I suspect your system will hover around 1% of a CPU, 0.125% of the system. Please post a screen shot so I can see the actual numbers.

 

Okay so I followed the relevant sections of the SIV Guide and got it up and running no problem. I did an AIDA64 CPU and FPU Stability test for one minute to make sure that the fan curve was working without Corsair Link running. It works great! The first screenshot is immediately after installing and setting up the program. The second screenshot is when I was running the AIDA64 Stability test. A vast improvement over Corsair Link! Thanks again!

 

http://i.imgur.com/BKTYwEB.png

http://i.imgur.com/y6PBmsO.png

 

Edit: about 10 minutes later, it seems to be hovering at 0.17%

Edit: about 40 minutes later, it seems to be hovering at 0.09%

Thank you for the screen shots and I can see SIV reports itself as using 0.25% of a CPU which is rather better than I hoped for so CL4 uses about 100 times more CPU time than SIV :eeeeek:!

 

The 0.25% includes time only used on SIV start-up, so it's expected to decrease with time. If you check the box to the left of % of 8 CPUs the load over 8 CPUs rather than 1 CPU is reported.

 

There seems to be some sort of issue with reporting the disk temperature information, but I would need to see Menu->Devices->SMART Drives to know what might be happening. Also when you started SIV how long did it take? It should take < 1 second, but I suspect it may have taken around 18 seconds. My guess is that it's down to a USB attached drive.