I installed both the driver and the optimizer, no change, my driver was out of date though. I tried disabling the paging file (to rule out the hard drive) and this is rather odd, after re-boot its showing no paging file, but task manager is still reading 296mb in the Page file usage..?!? attached image.

I tried running it with one thread, both CPUs were working on it but it totaled to 50% again, the odd thing is the paging file went up to 500mb... wondering now if my memory is malfunctioning.