My main desktop is a 350GHz i5-4690 processor (which is old!) on a Gigabyte mb with 16Gb RAM and an old Samsung Evo PRO 400Gb SSD C drive which has pretty much nothing on it except 86Gb of OS and programs. Graphics is an nVidia GTX750.
I have a small old SSD which is used for the swapfile and temp files. I am sure I've not bought any bits for it in the 5+ years since I stopped work, except a larger SSD for much of my data! It is on for 18 hours a day, every day, and sadly is in (mostly light) use for at least 6 hours most days.
I rarely get it warm let alone max it out, but I have been converting videos from avi to mp4 using Handbrake over the past few days and it sits at 100% when doing it (though something handles load balancing quite nicely as you see no real impact on other programs). But I am quite happy using 100% of the processor from time to time, It's what it's there for!! I think if I had a processor twice as fast it would still run at 100%, albeit getting the job done quicker...
I like having decent performance and response times and for sure, if it started to decline and I couldn't resolve it quickly, I'd replace it like a flash. I suppose the 200mb hard wired internet connection is a bonus too. I am told the fan is a but noisy but as I'm a bit mutton I'm not so bothered :-)
tbh unless you are using something really processor hungryl (e.g. some games or databases) I think it can be as much about tuning and/or fast peripherals as the actual CPU hardware you are running (so long as it isn't too old!!)
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