Using second graphics card causes high CPU usage DWM.exe

This happens no matter what the second graphics card is. I've even tried with another NVidia GT 610 that had 1GB of video RAM.

The monitors of the second card can be active, and showing just the desktop all day long, but the moment i put any app (Desktop, or store app) onto either of them, Desktop Window Manager's CPU spikes really high, and stays there. Anywhere from 20% to 75% of my CPU gets used, and my whole system gets bogged down.

So far, the only solution I've seen is to simply not use a second card, but having the extra monitors is useful for some of the things I do.

I tried the Microsoft Answers forums, but they weren't able to help. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Assuming that you are not running these cards in SLI due to the age, why are you using multiple cards?

The single GT610 is capable of displaying output to 2 monitors at once. See -- drivers - How to get dual monitor set up with NVIDIA Geforce GT 610 - Super User

The problem with using multiple cards however, is this then becomes bottlenecked by your Motherboard / Processor as you are seeing.

These two cards cannot be run in SLI mode. SLI mode requires at least two NVidia 680i graphics cards, which I do not own.

The idea is that when needed, I have the two extra monitors on the ATI card mostly for things like extra documents, (like say if i want to have them open for immediate reference on something I'm working on) or to have a movie on one that is visible to my main living area if i have company.

Under normal circumstances, I generally just use 1 or 2 displays on the NVidia card, either extended, or duplicated. I can see the bottleneck, but I'm wondering if there is a way to lessen, or eliminate it, without having to remove the second card.

Edit: To clarify a bit, my normal setup is up to 2 monitors on each card. NVidia is setup with multiple monitors enabled at least 90% of the time. I don't often use the second card.

Edit2: to correct my own possible mistake here... I may have been wrong about the 680i requirement, but I do know for sure that the GT610 cards are not SLI capable video cards.

Seems like your CPU is a bottleneck for so much data that has to be processed.