Average CPU Cycles

Hardware components are the internal organs of your computer and the better they are, the more powerful games and apps you can run. A part of development is to make the product use system resources efficiently, with a lot of monitoring tools on the market. Amongst others, Average CPU Cycles comes as a lightweight solution to see just how much pressure a running process puts on your CPU.

There's no need to go through an installation process because of the application's clever design, which also enables you to take it with you on a removable storage device. System registries remain intact as a consequence, but you need to make sure you have .NET Framework installed, although recent iterations of Windows include it in the basic package.

Regardless of your experience with computers, the application poses no accommodation problems whatsoever. Most of the space is used to display CPU usage values shown in MHz, average in percentage, as well as the total number of cycles. There's also an average total, as well as the current load.

Progress bars are constantly on the move to indicate usage, both on an average as well as for real time. You can view the number of cores your CPU has, but no option for individual consumption. A neat feature is a small slider that lets you adjust refresh intervals, from twenty milliseconds to two seconds. Even at a low rate, resource usage is minimum, but you might not be able to keep up.

The application directly targets processes, but not all at once. These are selected from a list, with options to trigger monitoring from the start or from the moment you hit “From now”. If more processes are found under the same name, these are all displayed and consumption summed. As a hint, you can start multiple instances of the application if you want to monitor more processes.

Sadly enough, there's no implemented function to save the log, not to mention having it automatically delivered. On the other hand, it's possible to copy all text displayed, but you need to increase the refresh rate because your selection is disregarded after each refresh making it impossible to copy when the slider is set to minimum.

To sum it up, Average CPU Cycles is a lightweight but powerful application you can use to keep an eye on the amount of CPU eaten up by running processes. It's a major disappointment you can't save log files. Overall, it's worth a try thanks to simplicity and possibility to run multiple instances for enhanced practicality.