i5 iMac and Windows 7: Headphone jack usage makes 1 core extra crazy

Just to follow up on this, the Boot Camp 3.1 drivers did not fix this issue.

I have exactly the same issue in 3.1. Remarkably silly.

I have an Imac 27 i7 cpu.

The same problem. The Cpu runs like crazy when you plug headphones in. Goes to almost nothing with them pulled out.

No problem like this on the mac side.

also, the imac has a trrs jack which is identical to the jack on an iphone. It is a tri-band jack That makes it also an external microphone jack.

With a triband headset such as a typical iphone headset you can can record or talk from the headset microphone rather than the built in one on the imac itself. Much better quality. I have tested and this works fine from the mac side but not from the windows 7 side.

I am an American professor in Europe and have a lot of problems getting windows 7 working on the new imac. I had to reinstall twice and now after about 5 days of work got all my scientific programs and settings installed on the imac.

When the bootcamp 3.1 update came out and imac updtated drivers came out I thought great maybe now these problems will be solved.

Then I find that I can't install either 3.1 or the new drivers from the imac update. Called support and they said the drivers can only be installed from a new install??????????

what, and go through 5 days of reinstall and then find the audio still doesn't work?

This is crazy.

I bought the imac in December because Apple advertised that you could run Windows natively on the imac and that there would be full support by the end of the year (2009) now it is Jan 20 and these important issues are not addressed.

Finally, in windows 7 there is no audio mixer which means I can record the sound from a screen capture other than from the output of the speakers to the input of the built in mic which is terrible quality.

Anyone know the resolution to that issue as well?

Thanks, Dr. Duke

I have an Imac 27 i7 cpu.

The same problem. The Cpu runs like crazy when you plug headphones in. Goes to almost nothing with them pulled out.

No problem like this on the mac side.

also, the imac has a trrs jack which is identical to the jack on an iphone. It is a tri-band jack That makes it also an external microphone jack.

With a triband headset such as a typical iphone headset you can can record or talk from the headset microphone rather than the built in one on the imac itself. Much better quality. I have tested and this works fine from the mac side but not from the windows 7 side.

I am an American professor in Europe and have a lot of problems getting windows 7 working on the new imac. I had to reinstall twice and now after about 5 days of work got all my scientific programs and settings installed on the imac.

When the bootcamp 3.1 update came out and imac updtated drivers came out I thought great maybe now these problems will be solved.

Then I find that I can't install either 3.1 or the new drivers from the imac update. Called support and they said the drivers can only be installed from a new install??????????

what, and go through 5 days of reinstall and then find the audio still doesn't work?

This is crazy.

I bought the imac in December because Apple advertised that you could run Windows natively on the imac and that there would be full support by the end of the year (2009) now it is Jan 20 and these important issues are not addressed.

Finally, in windows 7 there is no audio mixer which means I can record the sound from a screen capture other than from the output of the speakers to the input of the built in mic which is terrible quality.

Anyone know the resolution to that issue as well?

Thanks, Dr. Duke

I just figured out this problem as well on my 27" i5 even after the 3.1 bootcamp update. I hope apple gets this resolved soon as this also caused my computer to not be able to enter the screensaver or sleep modes, unplugging the speakers gets everything working again but i much prefer my external speakers to the built in ones.

Exactly same issue on my i7 27-inch iMac.

Glad I ran across this thread. I have been gaming in Win7 on this beast since early December and I shudder at the damage done to my computer just by having my Swan M10 speakers plugged in.

This is very worrisome for those of us who have adopted these new iMacs as our gaming rigs.

Not only does the cpu run crazy but the imac 27 gets very, very hot. Since I unplugged the headphones, it runs much, much cooler.

Certainly, some Mac engineers should take care of this problem, it seems it is universal on all the imac 27's and from what I gather, the smaller screened cousins too.

Also, we certainly want a stereo mix option for audio in or out, or what is called "what you hear" or wave out. Imac is supposed to be much geared to multimedia apps.

Finally, the mic jack part of the trrs set up MUST be fixed! A lot of manufacturers are going to headset combo jacks as they call them, mic in and stereo out on the same tribanded plug. But, the old single jack for mic in and single jack for stereo out are two tiny parts of the hardware and super inexpensive for the manufacturer. Why in the **** to go to the "advanced" triplug if the **** thing doesn't work.

Mac has a great reputation. I hope they remedy these problems right away.

Anyone whose imac 27 or 24 whose headset plug is working correctly. Let us know! I don't think anyone's is, but I think that few people understand that their cpu is running so much faster with the plug in, plus few even understand the combo jack and the triband, or trrs audio jack! Out of 4 audio technicians I talked to, not one of them knew what a trrs jack was or that you even have a mic in jack as part of the headset jack!

When I told one senior that it worked on the Mac side, he didn't believe for a while, thought my sound might be recorded from the onboard mic, but I proved it to him by tapping iaudibly on my iphone mic headset and and it showing up in garage band clearly and listening to big difference in audio.

As for a usb audio adapter, I am in a neon light environment and find that those adapters are more sensitive to electrical interference. Besides I want to use the headset jack as it was meant to be used!

Thats it.

Again, if anyone using an imac 27 and windows 7 64 or 32 doesnt have these problems, let us know! We are all anxious for a fix!

Best to all!

Hahaha, I laught my *** off when I found this problem. I share it with you guys and hope that there is no damaged done to the computer luckely i found this thread after just some hours of CPU torture. Lets just hope that it will be fixed soon. Its kind of strange though that apple has official support for xp, and vista and the same problem seem to occur using these os

Hello to everybody,

I wish to add to the thread also my experience (so Apple may see that there are lot of users with the same problem 🙂.

I've installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit on my iMac and after a couple of days working normally, one day I've noticed that the screensaver stopped to work.

While surfing the net for another problem (the fake 32bit color depth....) I've found this one and I remembered that the screensaver stopped to work after I had plugged my external speakers! :O

I made the check suggested (4th core to 100%), then removed a little the plug: 4th core to <1% and screensaver back on!

Apple, I know that you want your users uses MacOS X but since at the moment mine freeze on it (so I'm forced to use Windows...) please keep an eye on problems like this...

You can work around this CPU usage spike when something is connected to the headphone jack.

Connect the speakers / headphones to the jack, and then pull then out a millimeter or so. If you have Windows Task Manager open wile doing this, you can see the core drop back to normal.

Odd. But true.

Anyone had any luck getting the iMac internal speakers to work inside Windows 7? - I can only get audio from the headphone jack. I've tried the latest Realtek drivers, but no good.

New i7 iMac owner and I am also experiencing the CPU spike when I plug in my external speakers while in Windows 7. I can only imagine that is related to driver issues, but trying to figure out which one is the offending party might be tough.

My work around so far has been to unplug the external speakers when I boot into windows and use a pair of USB headphones to game with. Not ideal at all but I'm sure my wife appreciates the quiet.

Weird bug. I'm glad I stumbled upon this thread, or I would still be torturing my 4th core.
Sounds like this should go on top of bootcamp developers' TODO list for the next release...

same problem here … running boot camp 3.1 and windows 7 64-bit on a 27" i5, and the cpu meter in windows runs constantly hot at about 37% whenever you have something plugged into the headphone jack … if you unplug the headphones, the cpu usage drops to normal almost immediately … i will try the work-around listed above, but i hope apple releases a more official update / fix soon … many people might be running a windows partition without realizing that their cpu is being pushed so hard.

Same issue on a core i7 iMac.

Under light usage with speakers plugged into the headphone jack my cpu temperature runs about 70 degrees Celsius.

Without the speakers it stays around 50 C. :/

Not to mention I'm also getting the graphics driver issue with the 4850. It says it's using 32-bit color mode when it's clearly only using 16.

I have the exact same problem everyone else is describing. I did a little digging and discovered that about 50% of the core usage is spent processing interrupts from the Cirrus sound chipset.

It is a boot camp driver issue. Hopefully Apple will release and updated driver soon.