multi-tasking lowered my cpu usage?

[ste2425]

well i was using ConvertXToDvd to encode some films ive got to burn to dvd an that was using 70% ish of my cpu, now i thought well ill pop in one of my games to turn into an iso. Loaded up the program started to make the iso an my cpu usage dropped to 50% max 55. Im just a little confused shouldnt this use up more of my cpu or is there a setting somewhere to stop my cpu being maxed out, like some sort of energy saver?

 

[AndyBroke]

Did you see how much memory you were using? Maybe you ran out of memory and the applications slowed down because they had to use the hdd as ram as well. The cpu clock multiplier is often lowered to save power, but only when the computer is idle. If the multiplier was lowered when you were preforming those tasks, the cpu usage would probably been shown as even higher in task manager.

 

[HalfAHertz]

Maybe your encoder has some function selected like background encoding - meaning that it's a low priority task. You could check through the program's settings or try setting the encoder at a higher affinity in the task manager.

 

[SoulTribunal]

Another possibility is that when running one task you were using 70% of a single CPU Core and when you started working on something else the other cores kicked in to spread the work load.

ST