Putting this in IMHO because though there’s got to be a clear factual answer, without personally examining my PC it’s more a matter of opinion, I’m guessing.
So, I recently purchased a new desktop PC with AMD processor for work that’s gaming-level, and has those unicorn puke rainbow-color RGB fans. To make them actually useful, I went in the AURA settings and set the RGB colors by CPU temp-- anything below 50C is green, 50-80 is yellow, and anything over 80 is red.
When I work, using mostly Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator as my most resource-intensive programs, it normally purrs along in the green. Even when I do a little gaming, it’s in the yellow, never the red.
But occasionally when I’m not doing much, like right now, it’ll go yellow, I’ll open Task Manager and see that the System (and sometimes other associated system files) are in ‘high power usage’ mode. It usually doesn’t last too long, but for the past 20 minutes or so now my System has been running “very high” in power usage. Nothing my machine can’t handle I think, no more than 15-20% CPU usage, but weird.
So what’s going on-- is this occasional high usage normal? Is the Win10 System just a resource hog?
Very well could be-- I think I’ve seen a lot of high power usage system activity just before I go to turn off the computer or put it to sleep and it’ll have the option of “update and restart” instead of just “restart”. So it could be the system prepping itself for an update.
It’s back in the green and a quieted-down fan now after a good 1/2 hour of running hotter.
I can’t tell you for sure what it is, but I’ve seen it occasionally. I keep task manager on my notification bar, and may notice it spiking. Whenever I’ve looked, it’s always something Microsoft related. And, by the time I look up how to deal with it, it stops.
My current best guess is that it’s just one of the various Task Scheduler maintenance tasks. I know there’s a periodic “defrag and trim” feature, for example.