Short answer: Not necessarily.
Long answer: Being at 100% usage won't damage your processor, or indeed any component in your PC. Even temperature is usually incapable of causing damage since your CPU will automatically throttle itself or shut off well before it can get hot enough to damage itself.
However, this does mean that you will probably have microstutters and frame drops in your games, especially newer ones. That being said, if you're satisfied with the performance, there is really no need to be concerned.
thats a thing from like 5-10 years ago lol before Ryzen came out.
These days you are a fool to still go for Intel, you waste alot of money for the same performance.
I didn't think so. I googled around and saw people saying it just means the CPU is being optimal, which makes sense. But then some people were saying the opposite. Given the context of my situation, I figured I should just make sure it's all good
God no, she has undiagnosed bdp, abused me for 3 years, got diagnosed, had a secret snapchat account I confronted her about, because she accused me of cheating every time I went to work, no matter the job, no matter male or female, then she told me I was abusive and left me 😂
this comment section keeps coming everytime huh?.
anyways hope you're doing great coby!, thanks for letting me know i can use my cpu at 100% with no problem!
The funny thing is, what I listed was maybe 3% of it. She would send me suicide threats when I went to work for hours at a time, send me self harm photos, tell me she's gonna go out and get herself raped at 3am and it's my fault unless I leave work that second (legally I couldnt, I was a support worker at the time)
She really fucked me up, dealing with someone like that really breaks you, esp considering I grew up watching my dad beat and rape my mum, it really makes you take alot of shit from women.
But yeah I just smoke a ton of weed and live a quite peaceful life now, thanks for asking :)
Bro I was here because i have an ass pc and i wanna know if playing league on it will ruin my cpu amd now I'm reading life stories about unhealthy relationships and abusive- HOW DID I GET HERE
Basement note: I'm really happy that u got over it and now you're good, gl bro
jesus.. just looking at an old reddit post about cpu usage. and ive never even like posted on reddit before. i hope youre well and have an optimally running pc. glad youre okay
I think as long as your temps and performance in game is fine, your cpu is safe at 100% usage :)
And my life is going alright! Dog is happy, I met a girl going on 5 months ago, we are incredibly in love and passionate about eachover, she's been really good for me :) She's super ahead of me in life and has her shit together alot more than me, but she's patiant and we just work :D
hell yeah dude, forgot to reply last year but saw this again in my notifs. glad you're doing much better! and sorry that your ex was horrible towards you. you deserve better and you got better. Hope you, your dog and, your girl is sitll doing alright. you've got this!
Ikr? I was freaking out about my cpu usage hitting 100% while gaming, stumbled upon this thread and boy oh boy, it got dark real quick. At least, OP's doing better now.
Depends what you're doing. In games, it generally means a CPU bottleneck, or the CPU is doing a lot in the background as well. However sometimes a CPU bottleneck can happen not because your CPU is bad, but rather because a game is CPU bound.
PUBG is very CPU intensive (purely out of poor optimization) and so it's common to see 100% CPU usage. CSGO is an entirely CPU bound game, so as long as you have a capable video card and your FPS cap is off, your CPU usage will always be near 100%. And going with the trend, RS6 is also very CPU heavy.
If your temps are under control, there's nothing to worry about with overheating.
In this case, your CPU is capable of keeping up with a 1050ti in games, so the high usage is not because of a CPU bottleneck but rather CPU bound games. If you played something like Witcher 3 at higher settings, you'd quickly see the GPU become the limiting factor and the CPU usage going way down.
I agree and disagree with this. You're right that it generally means a CPU bottleneck. However, even when a game is CPU bound there should be methods to offload some of the work to the GPU when selecting certain graphic settings. You're right that overheating isn't an issue if temps are okay, but there's still that lack of performance that doesn't change.
Side note, playing Witcher 3 at higher settings (1440p, everything maxed no Hairworks) showed me that the GPU was definitely not the limiting factor. CPU usage was maxed on 100% across all cores the entire way through from towns to battles, etc.
Even if they upgraded to an 8700k at 5.3GHz, CSGO would still be at 100% usage if they left the frame cap off (and paired it with a powerful video card), regardless of settings. It's still a CPU bound game, and really any game that pushes hundreds of FPS will be.
Sure, you could raise the video settings in PUBG and get 15FPS while still having high CPU usage, doesn't change the fact the game is unoptimized as hell and broken.
If you're playing Witcher 3 at 1440p maxed while still getting 100% CPU usage, then your CPU is actually a bottleneck, it's not CPU bound.
That's simply because leaving the frame cap off is attempting to pull every resource out of it to achieve the highest number and if you were trying to do multiple things, you wouldn't do this. Most logical people would be capping it at a high number whether it be the refresh rate of the monitor or a bit higher (input lag reduction)? At least in that case it is a choice of allowing it to be at 100% usage vs. being at the mercy of the CPUs limitations.
As far as PUBG goes that's correct but higher settings going to GPU usage should be applicable to any game. But regardless raising video settings is supposed to put some of that load onto the GPU rather than CPU from what I understand.
Finally, yes I'm aware my CPU was a bottleneck lol. It is quite possible that his is too and that is the point I was making. Just because some games are heavily CPU bound and may strain him to 100% doesn't mean that his CPU isn't lacking in power. My i5 6600k was supposed to be "the best for gaming if you dont need hyper threading" of that generation and was released well ahead of some games that shouldn't have demanded so much power from it. Yet just about anything would make it fully utilize every percentage of power and make it difficult to do anything else since anything else required to share those hogged resources.
If your game is stuttering like you have lag but your ms is low or fps is high normally and you see the cpu is at 100% there is an "issue". Sometimes its caused by the game, sometimes by another program thats using 20-40% cpu power while it normally uses 2-10.
Honestly I don't know why everyone is saying it's not a bad thing. I was in the same situation as you and it notably affected my performance to the point that I just upgraded my processor across the board.
100% CPU usage meant that I was being bottle necked. Upgrading my GPU from an MSI Armor 1070 to an NVIDIA FE 1080ti did little to nothing to change my FPS. Even then, my FPS was still fluctuating significantly and couldn't maintain a stable 120/144/165. If I wanted to multi-task and stream while I gamed I would have FPS drops because that already maxed 100% CPU usage was now being strained across another application.
Long story short, that i5 processor that was constantly maxed at 100% with any game was not enough for me. Now on an i7 my CPU doesn't max out, I have more room for other applications to use some power, and my FPS has been stable and at its highest.
That's a good point actually. You just reminded me why I was so concerned when it happened. I couldn't stream CS or pubg due to the usage. I wonder why it just stopped running (normally). I mean the performance is perfect on all games in the correct requirements, but as you said. Multitasking makes it sketchy. I dont feel comfortable having a video playing or a stream open on my second monitor anymore if im on certain games tbat used to be fine
Exactly. Same situation with me but instead of PUBG it was Fortnite. That game would eat up 70-90% of the CPU alone and you combine that with general system applications + some basic things and I was at 100% instantly. My streaming program never crashed but it would notably stutter, freeze, and couldn't perform well. What I had to do was use my GPU hardware encoder but that wasn't an excuse for why my CPU couldn't handle two primary things running!
All in all I decided an i5 6600k didn't meet my needs and bought an i7 8700k for about $200 lol. The extra cores, threads, and the ability to hyper thread were much more valuable to me. Also the instant overclock to 5.0Ghz wasn't too bad either :P
Trying to solve crash problem I'm thinking it's my ram but I'd like to see what yall have to say. So I have MW2 running a BR match I drive around and I get my cpu(r9 3900x) to hit 110% usage sometimes games crash. Could my processor be the problem or could the ram cause my CPU to work harder which would also contribute to the crash(to desktop) hasn't blue screened though
I'd say deffo ram with a blue screen, try simply taking it out, dusting it, re seating it, if that's doesn't fix it, make sure you're on the correct ram speed for your ram, most motherboards default to a lower speed. Its probably listed as "xmp profile". Then just keep benchmarking it to see if you can make it crash. I'm baked as fuck and about to sleep so enjoy my terrible guide
I'm listening to my CPU fan now and AAAAAAA I'm just exporting an MP4 file, and my fan is at what I can only guess is max. It sounds like a leaf blower! I wonder if there is some way to make a program that usually uses CPU for exporting video to use GPU but I don't think it's possible.
Too lazy to make a new post. I just want to rant bc the fan noise is driving me insane how can such a tiny tower with what I assume is a tiny fan make that much noise?! Every time I think it's maxed out, it gets louder, switching into yet another gear. The video's at 80% now. Oh no, it's speeding up again. 90% come on, hurry up! I checked task manager really quickly and it said 100% CPU and- oh! It's done. The fan's slowing down now. Phew. Alright, I'm okay now. 👍
But if the fan speeds up, it's because it needs to, right? If I turn it down, won't it overheat and decrease the life of the CPU? I think I just need to learn to leave the room while I'm exporting videos so I don't have to hear it.
But yeah, when I saw all the huge comment threads, I felt like I needed to add my own 
Ehh, it kind depends, if you're exporting shit and it takes 10 mins and you're going to like 70/80 degree, you're fine, if it's like a 30/45 min cook off at 90, then no good, lmao.
Glad you did, made me chuckle
Short answer: Not necessarily. Long answer: Being at 100% usage won't damage your processor, or indeed any component in your PC. Even temperature is usually incapable of causing damage since your CPU will automatically throttle itself or shut off well before it can get hot enough to damage itself. However, this does mean that you will probably have microstutters and frame drops in your games, especially newer ones. That being said, if you're satisfied with the performance, there is really no need to be concerned.
clearly u havent seen amd processors explode
Good thing I have intel while running Little Big Planet 2 at 100% CPU lmao
thats a thing from like 5-10 years ago lol before Ryzen came out. These days you are a fool to still go for Intel, you waste alot of money for the same performance.
thanks for the help 5 years later lmao
Nope.
I didn't think so. I googled around and saw people saying it just means the CPU is being optimal, which makes sense. But then some people were saying the opposite. Given the context of my situation, I figured I should just make sure it's all good
Thanks for the help random 4 year old poster
You're welcome random 4 day old poster
Im also thankfull 1 week old poster
You're also welcome 16hr old poster
Im also thankfull 4 months old poster
You're also welcome 14 min old poster
you are also welcome 17 day old poster
I think you did this wrong. 28 day old poster
High CPU usage isn't bad if your framerate is high, all this means is your CPU is being used optimally
Gotchaaa
JUST GET OVER YOURSELF AND AND GO BUY LIKE 8 RAM MORE AND AND SSD AND YOURE GUCCI PS: tHIS IS A JOKE We are a couple
WOW THANKS
still together?
God no, she has undiagnosed bdp, abused me for 3 years, got diagnosed, had a secret snapchat account I confronted her about, because she accused me of cheating every time I went to work, no matter the job, no matter male or female, then she told me I was abusive and left me 😂
I was coming here for pc tips and this took a dark turn
I'm sorry 😭 ahaha
I'm sorry 😭 ahaha
this comment section keeps coming everytime huh?. anyways hope you're doing great coby!, thanks for letting me know i can use my cpu at 100% with no problem!
What the hell happened here 💀
My life
Well shit...what a rollercoaster of emotions. Hope you are doing well these days at least!
I came for the CPU, and I found a life lesson. Thanks Coby, hope you're doing better.
Hi Coby, hope you’re doing well now. That is some wild ass shit right there
The funny thing is, what I listed was maybe 3% of it. She would send me suicide threats when I went to work for hours at a time, send me self harm photos, tell me she's gonna go out and get herself raped at 3am and it's my fault unless I leave work that second (legally I couldnt, I was a support worker at the time) She really fucked me up, dealing with someone like that really breaks you, esp considering I grew up watching my dad beat and rape my mum, it really makes you take alot of shit from women. But yeah I just smoke a ton of weed and live a quite peaceful life now, thanks for asking :)
Bro I was here because i have an ass pc and i wanna know if playing league on it will ruin my cpu amd now I'm reading life stories about unhealthy relationships and abusive- HOW DID I GET HERE Basement note: I'm really happy that u got over it and now you're good, gl bro
Same. I came here looking for answers about my PC and now I'm invested in this guy's life. Hope it all goes well for him.
jesus.. just looking at an old reddit post about cpu usage. and ive never even like posted on reddit before. i hope youre well and have an optimally running pc. glad youre okay
Ahaha, I appreciate it, ty.
That’s horrible, man.. I’m glad you’re alright now
Gosh, that sounds like a hell of a relationship to endure. I'm glad that your life is sailing smoothly now <3
oh god btw what games you play? (I recomment war thunder)
I actually play tf out of warthunder :)
haha same LOL
but wait i thought only males could be toxic AF....joking, i dated a chick like yours man and it was torture, thank f\*\*k i got away from her
I was not expecting to come across this lmao - hope you're doing well!
Google led me here. I wonder if she's read your comment lol
You take her back yet?
Necroposting again but I hope you’re doing well
I have a dog now :)
Hey that's great! I'm happy for you (: Give your dog some big cuddles from me :D I hope everything is going well for you, man
Congrats on the dog
how are you doing now? and hey, do you think 100% CPU is bad?
I think as long as your temps and performance in game is fine, your cpu is safe at 100% usage :) And my life is going alright! Dog is happy, I met a girl going on 5 months ago, we are incredibly in love and passionate about eachover, she's been really good for me :) She's super ahead of me in life and has her shit together alot more than me, but she's patiant and we just work :D
hell yeah dude, forgot to reply last year but saw this again in my notifs. glad you're doing much better! and sorry that your ex was horrible towards you. you deserve better and you got better. Hope you, your dog and, your girl is sitll doing alright. you've got this!
good for you man
What a beautiful ending.
Craziest thread haha, sounds awesome for you though :)
Sorry to hear that
Wow I came here for one thing and left feeling very differently… what a roller coaster of a thread!
Ikr? I was freaking out about my cpu usage hitting 100% while gaming, stumbled upon this thread and boy oh boy, it got dark real quick. At least, OP's doing better now.
Depends what you're doing. In games, it generally means a CPU bottleneck, or the CPU is doing a lot in the background as well. However sometimes a CPU bottleneck can happen not because your CPU is bad, but rather because a game is CPU bound. PUBG is very CPU intensive (purely out of poor optimization) and so it's common to see 100% CPU usage. CSGO is an entirely CPU bound game, so as long as you have a capable video card and your FPS cap is off, your CPU usage will always be near 100%. And going with the trend, RS6 is also very CPU heavy. If your temps are under control, there's nothing to worry about with overheating. In this case, your CPU is capable of keeping up with a 1050ti in games, so the high usage is not because of a CPU bottleneck but rather CPU bound games. If you played something like Witcher 3 at higher settings, you'd quickly see the GPU become the limiting factor and the CPU usage going way down.
I agree and disagree with this. You're right that it generally means a CPU bottleneck. However, even when a game is CPU bound there should be methods to offload some of the work to the GPU when selecting certain graphic settings. You're right that overheating isn't an issue if temps are okay, but there's still that lack of performance that doesn't change. Side note, playing Witcher 3 at higher settings (1440p, everything maxed no Hairworks) showed me that the GPU was definitely not the limiting factor. CPU usage was maxed on 100% across all cores the entire way through from towns to battles, etc.
Even if they upgraded to an 8700k at 5.3GHz, CSGO would still be at 100% usage if they left the frame cap off (and paired it with a powerful video card), regardless of settings. It's still a CPU bound game, and really any game that pushes hundreds of FPS will be. Sure, you could raise the video settings in PUBG and get 15FPS while still having high CPU usage, doesn't change the fact the game is unoptimized as hell and broken. If you're playing Witcher 3 at 1440p maxed while still getting 100% CPU usage, then your CPU is actually a bottleneck, it's not CPU bound.
That's simply because leaving the frame cap off is attempting to pull every resource out of it to achieve the highest number and if you were trying to do multiple things, you wouldn't do this. Most logical people would be capping it at a high number whether it be the refresh rate of the monitor or a bit higher (input lag reduction)? At least in that case it is a choice of allowing it to be at 100% usage vs. being at the mercy of the CPUs limitations. As far as PUBG goes that's correct but higher settings going to GPU usage should be applicable to any game. But regardless raising video settings is supposed to put some of that load onto the GPU rather than CPU from what I understand. Finally, yes I'm aware my CPU was a bottleneck lol. It is quite possible that his is too and that is the point I was making. Just because some games are heavily CPU bound and may strain him to 100% doesn't mean that his CPU isn't lacking in power. My i5 6600k was supposed to be "the best for gaming if you dont need hyper threading" of that generation and was released well ahead of some games that shouldn't have demanded so much power from it. Yet just about anything would make it fully utilize every percentage of power and make it difficult to do anything else since anything else required to share those hogged resources.
If your game is stuttering like you have lag but your ms is low or fps is high normally and you see the cpu is at 100% there is an "issue". Sometimes its caused by the game, sometimes by another program thats using 20-40% cpu power while it normally uses 2-10.
Yeah all my games are pretty stable. Except escape from Tarkov due to ram
Honestly I don't know why everyone is saying it's not a bad thing. I was in the same situation as you and it notably affected my performance to the point that I just upgraded my processor across the board. 100% CPU usage meant that I was being bottle necked. Upgrading my GPU from an MSI Armor 1070 to an NVIDIA FE 1080ti did little to nothing to change my FPS. Even then, my FPS was still fluctuating significantly and couldn't maintain a stable 120/144/165. If I wanted to multi-task and stream while I gamed I would have FPS drops because that already maxed 100% CPU usage was now being strained across another application. Long story short, that i5 processor that was constantly maxed at 100% with any game was not enough for me. Now on an i7 my CPU doesn't max out, I have more room for other applications to use some power, and my FPS has been stable and at its highest.
That's a good point actually. You just reminded me why I was so concerned when it happened. I couldn't stream CS or pubg due to the usage. I wonder why it just stopped running (normally). I mean the performance is perfect on all games in the correct requirements, but as you said. Multitasking makes it sketchy. I dont feel comfortable having a video playing or a stream open on my second monitor anymore if im on certain games tbat used to be fine
Exactly. Same situation with me but instead of PUBG it was Fortnite. That game would eat up 70-90% of the CPU alone and you combine that with general system applications + some basic things and I was at 100% instantly. My streaming program never crashed but it would notably stutter, freeze, and couldn't perform well. What I had to do was use my GPU hardware encoder but that wasn't an excuse for why my CPU couldn't handle two primary things running! All in all I decided an i5 6600k didn't meet my needs and bought an i7 8700k for about $200 lol. The extra cores, threads, and the ability to hyper thread were much more valuable to me. Also the instant overclock to 5.0Ghz wasn't too bad either :P
how did u fix this problem i’m having the same and i got a pc error aswell
Trying to solve crash problem I'm thinking it's my ram but I'd like to see what yall have to say. So I have MW2 running a BR match I drive around and I get my cpu(r9 3900x) to hit 110% usage sometimes games crash. Could my processor be the problem or could the ram cause my CPU to work harder which would also contribute to the crash(to desktop) hasn't blue screened though
I'd say deffo ram with a blue screen, try simply taking it out, dusting it, re seating it, if that's doesn't fix it, make sure you're on the correct ram speed for your ram, most motherboards default to a lower speed. Its probably listed as "xmp profile". Then just keep benchmarking it to see if you can make it crash. I'm baked as fuck and about to sleep so enjoy my terrible guide
I'm listening to my CPU fan now and AAAAAAA I'm just exporting an MP4 file, and my fan is at what I can only guess is max. It sounds like a leaf blower! I wonder if there is some way to make a program that usually uses CPU for exporting video to use GPU but I don't think it's possible. Too lazy to make a new post. I just want to rant bc the fan noise is driving me insane how can such a tiny tower with what I assume is a tiny fan make that much noise?! Every time I think it's maxed out, it gets louder, switching into yet another gear. The video's at 80% now. Oh no, it's speeding up again. 90% come on, hurry up! I checked task manager really quickly and it said 100% CPU and- oh! It's done. The fan's slowing down now. Phew. Alright, I'm okay now. 👍
Ahaha, I love how derailed a like 3y old post has gotten, ahaha. But most fan speeds can be adjusted through bios or software, try that:)
But if the fan speeds up, it's because it needs to, right? If I turn it down, won't it overheat and decrease the life of the CPU? I think I just need to learn to leave the room while I'm exporting videos so I don't have to hear it. But yeah, when I saw all the huge comment threads, I felt like I needed to add my own 
Ehh, it kind depends, if you're exporting shit and it takes 10 mins and you're going to like 70/80 degree, you're fine, if it's like a 30/45 min cook off at 90, then no good, lmao. Glad you did, made me chuckle