[individualcell]

Are you saying that when you start a game, you are closing all the programs you have opened and disable all the services/background processes? If a game uses 6 cores, you can have 2 more for your office, browser and god knows what else running without slowing you down.

[Boxxed]

Just because the program is running doesn't mean it's using any appreciable amount of CPU. Most applications spend their time waiting for IO, and when you're not interacting with them, there isn't any.

[individualcell]

Sure, but are you checking that every single application you have opened does "nothing" before you start a game? The point is to not being worried about such things.

[paulmd]

Background services (Discord, etc) use a negligible amount of processor power. It should be like sub-5% on a modern processor, with the processor clocked down to its lowest frequency. With the processor at turbo, you should be pulling 1-3% easily, even actively using multiple tasks.

These days even Chrome is very aggressive about throttling background tabs, much to the consternation of some webdevs here.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/chrom...

[FractalParadigm]

So much this, to say "you only need x cores because the software can only use x cores" is a little shortsighted, because there's always stuff happening in the background.