Intel® Core™ X-series processor family have another tool to help avoid slowdowns, as their Intel® Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 automatically assigns the biggest tasks to your fastest processor cores, as well as boosting the frequency of those cores.

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology can also help processing of heavy workloads by dynamically increasing the frequency of your CPU. If the CPU usage of a heavy-duty program like Adobe Premiere is high, it may just be efficiently using the CPU cores available to it.

Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel® HT Technology) takes it a step further, creating multiple “threads” of execution in each core, each of which handles different processes. Modern CPUs handle multitasking situations by splitting processes between multiple processor cores, which work through different sets of instructions simultaneously. It’s important to remember that high CPU usage while multitasking can be normal.

If you’re dealing with this kind of everyday high-CPU usage situation, you should close all background programs and tabs you aren’t using, then return to Task Manager and see if the situation has changed. You can expect high CPU utilization when playing some games, running a video-editing or streaming application, performing an antivirus scan, or juggling many browser tabs.