High 'System' Process CPU Usage and Fan Noise - Solution Found

Question

Recently, my Inspiron 7620 with an NVIDIA GeForce 3060 card started experiencing high fan noise with the 'System' process consistently running at 10% to 20% of the CPU.  I reset my system but the issue reoccurred 5 days later.  I traced that to an updated NIVDIA driver that was automatically applied to my system.  When I reverted to an older driver the issue was immediately resolved.  The driver that fixed the issue is 31.0.15.1778 dated 11/8/2022. I also turned off the automatic driver update by navigating to: Control Panel > System & Security > System > Advanced System Settings > Hardware > Device Installation Settings. Then selected 'No (your device might not work as expected).'  Hope that helps some folks out!

Gutou1230 · Answer

I had the same problem one week starting one week ago. Tried to rollback the driver, but still high CPU. Not sure whether it is because I did not do a system reset. It end up I have disable the NVIDIA card from device manager.

CPUSmithers · Answer

I downloaded the latest driver from Nvidia site which is 551.61 and that fixed the utilization issue. Used this to find the reason.

https://superuser.com/questions/527401/troubleshoot-high-cpu-usage-by-the-system-process

Is Dell going to update the driver or how can we report it?

Inspiron

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