I've had my Ryzen 5 5600 PC for about two years, and recently I've noticed it's consuming a lot more power at idle than it should—around 70-75W and maintaining a temperature of 82-84°C. Oddly, whenever I open the task manager, the power usage drops significantly to about 25-29W and the temperature cools down to just over 45°C. It's getting suspicious since I can actually feel the temperature drop when I do this because the PC is right next to my monitor. Is this a software glitch, or could I be dealing with some sort of cryptojacking? By the way, I discovered a fix using Kaspersky's scan tool after some digging around; I found a stealthy trojan that wasn't detectable by regular task management tools. It seemed to deactivate itself whenever I opened a process monitor, but it remained active when using hardware monitors like HWMonitor or AMD Ryzen Master.
3 Answers
Yeah, it definitely seems probable that something malicious is at play. Since you've already found the trojan with Kaspersky, you're on the right track. But keep monitoring your CPU usage to ensure it doesn’t come back!
Thanks for the input, everyone! I was really confused before. Seems like I’ve got a handle on the issue now!
It sounds like a likely case of a miner virus. You might want to use tools like Process Explorer to keep an eye on CPU usage or do a complete antivirus scan for peace of mind. If things get really tricky, a fresh Windows installation can be the safest bet!
Also, you can try using the tasklist command in Command Prompt; it might help you spot the culprit.