I think steam client is used by valve to mine bitcoins during idle

[ok420]

/s

no but seriously that would atleast explain the insanely high cpu usage when idle, that i cant explain myself otherwise because steam is basically just an skinned down browser with a few extra features like launching games etc

maybe someone can explain me why exactly steam takes 5-35% cpu on a i7 4790k while doing NOTHING and not being very heavy load or heavy on memory

[cinedine]

Steam is using less than 0.5 % of my CPU. You obviously have it doing something so it doesn't idle.

[ok420]

Originally posted by cinedine:

Steam is using less than 0.5 % of my CPU. You obviously have it doing something so it doesn't idle.

no.. i dont. its just running and online, not doing anything, not downloading anything

[Spawn of Totoro]

Originally posted by cinedine:

Steam is using less than 0.5 % of my CPU.

Same here. Between 0.1% and 0.6%, when idle.

[Glimmer]

.3% on my laptop, .4% on my desktop.
My Linux laptop is showing 0%, unfortunately it does not appear to measure tenths of a percent.

Repeatedly re-positioning the window caused a spike up to 5%. Moving my mouse across the Store,Library, etc links causes it to run up to 22%. Scrolling through the list of games in my Library was getting spikes up to 14%. Checking for updates went up to 4%, and downloading them was around 1%.

[Unexpected]

are you running tons of other things in the background too? running steam does literally nothing to my computer

[GenRabbit]

Most likely its the DRM kicking in to cxheck for what games you own, and for checking if some of your games has gotten updates. And updating can be a resource hog. Turning of INDEXING on the HDD an help on some titles(especially Payday2 comes to mind)