Epic Windows Game Launcher Caught Ryzen’s CPU Peak Temperature, Calling Home Even When Idle

Although Epic Games offers games at Christmas, not everything that looks free really is. Whether due to poor design, stealthy data collection or a combination of the two, Epic Games Launcher appears to be continuously running some sort of relatively demanding process in the background. This problem is so pronounced that a Reddit user by name Neoncarbon noticed that the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X’s idle temperature dropped from 50 ° C to 37 ° C when he closed the application. In fact, we have also proved this for ourselves, as you will see in the screenshots below. What is strange is that other game store applications, such as GOG and Steam, do not exhibit this behavior. What exactly could Epic Games Launcher be doing in the background that is raising CPU temperatures even when idle, when other launchers don’t have this problem?

With over 6,800 positive votes and 864 comments, Neoncarbon’s Reddit post evolved to people sharing similar experiences after closing Epic Game Launcher. It seems that anyone who has the Epic Games launcher running in the background has higher temperature and CPU usage, even when idle on the desktop. However, it seems especially pronounced on Ryzen CPUs like Neoncarbon’s Ryzen 7 5800X. Once again, we were also able to verify this abnormal activity in one of our testbeds, running a liquid-cooled AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080. In the first image below, you will notice the CPU temperatures in this well-cooled rig around 53C when the Epic Games launcher is running and with about 2% CPU usage from the application itself on a 16-core Zen 3 chip.

with epic game launcher without game update — *Ryzen 9 5950X CPU Epic Games Active Idle Desktop Temp*

Using the same equipment and taking a look at the task manager, we noticed that the Epic Games launcher is lighting up cores and keeping some of them lit, even though apparently doing nothing, and not even updating a game in the background.

Non-epic CPU — *Ryzen 9 5950X CPU Temps and use without Epic Games Launcher*

Epic CPU — *Ryzen 9 5950X CPU Temps and use with Epic Games Launcher active*

Ultimately, these spikes in temperature and CPU usage are not typical of game starters. When experimenting with the Steam and GOG launchers, idle CPU temperatures and usage remained nominal and much lower, after a brief initial spike in loading. So, what exactly is happening with the Epic Games Launcher that idle temps are increasing and CPU usage is unnecessarily involved?

Doing some tests on another personal machine, we noticed that Epic Games Launcher has five different processes open at the same time. Out of curiosity, we opened Glasswire, which is a free network traffic monitor. We could see that the Epic Games Launcher and associated processes fired data at regular intervals for more than 22 different servers. This was happening whether we had the initiator open, minimized, or in the background. The biggest peaks shown in the Glasswire chart below are when we reopened the Epic Games launcher after closing it.

Another interesting finding is that “EpicWebHelper” sent some data to the following URL:

tracking-website-prod07-epic-961842049.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com

Over the course of about an hour, Epic Games sent more data than 514 KB of data to some servers somewhere. That’s more than 14 times what Steam and NVIDIA GeForce Experience sent in the background during the same period. It is not yet known whether data collection is the cause of the CPU usage problem, but something smells suspicious here. In fact, it may be advisable to shut down the Epic Games launcher for now, when you are not actively using it.

That said, what do you think of these antics from the Epic Games launcher? What are you seeing on your machine? Let us know in the comments below.

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