Sorry for not replying earlier. The numerous times I tried to tinker with the PC to fix this issue caused me to spill water and short out my keyboard. To clarify, the current issue is my computer's cpu is heartbeating to ~10% every second. This causes a small stutter on any application including the desktop. Videos are not being able to be played smoothly regardless of format or quality. This came out of nowhere as this is my main TV watching PC. Thank you for the suggestion of moving the GPU, unfortunately moving the card to the 8x PCIE slot did not change the spikes. But, you were right about Nvidia. I did notice that the stock intel VGA drivers did not cause any spikes and idled my CPU at 0%. At this time I have pretty much done everything related to this issue and following every thread on google for the first 20 pages. Tried: Updating and downgrading every driver on the machine. Tried 4 different Nvidia versions. Every possible scan has been preformed. (Memtest, Malewarebytes, Intel Processor Diag, Antivirus x5, ect...) BIOS was up to date prior to the issue. Computer is fulled cleaned and dusted. Disconnected every USB port. Disabled devices and services, one by one, with restarts. a very tedious experiment. Clean boot - No stutter on Intel GPU drivers, otherwise remains the same. This thread will be my last hope. I never have accepted defeat to a windows machine, but 50 hours later, I am considering it. As always, a reformat fixes everything. Edit: should probably post some specs: Operating SystemWindows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1CPUIntel Core i5 2500K @ 3.30GHz 42 °CSandy Bridge 32nm TechnologyRAM8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 1066MHz (11-11-11-30)MotherboardASRock Z77 Extreme4 (CPUSocket) 40 °CGraphicsPanasonic-TV (1920x1080@60Hz)ELDFT501J (1920x1080@60Hz)Intel HD Graphics 3000 (ASRock)2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 (PNY) 40 °CStorage465GB MAXTOR STM3500630AS ATA Device (SATA) 50 °C1397GB Western Digital WDC WD15EADS-00P8B0 ATA Device (SATA) 44 °C111GB TOSHIBA MKNSSDCR120GB ATA Device (SSD) 42 °C931GB Western Digital WDC WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0 ATA Device (SATA) 44 °COptical DrivesATAPI iHAS124 B ATA Device