I had this issue for the longest time. Synapse itself has compatibility issues with other programs, things you would not even expect. I had pretty much a mirror machine of the machine I am on now. The only difference were the games on the other machine, or so I thought...then after closer inspection I had Microsoft XNA Redistributable 4.0 refresh and XNA 3.1 on the machine having the high CPU usage on Synapse. So I decided to give it a shot and remove them. Since then no more high CPU usage from Synapse.
I am not saying yours will be that piece of software, as I don't expect everyone to need XNA. But I also had a laptop with the same high CPU usage from Synapse on it. that did not have XNA. I had to reinstall Windows 10 all over again on that laptop (due to another issue with trying to mod Win 10), in doing so I had to reinstall all the software I could remember. Which of course was not all of the software it had before, and it has not had the high CPU usage issue again either. Meaning I did not install whichever program on the laptop that was conflicting with Synapse. And I know for sure that laptop did not have XNA on it. So, in short you will have to hunt to find the conflicting program.
CPU/Hardware, definitely not a problem. I have also an old socket 478 1.8ghz Pentium 4 (Single core, not even Hyper Threading was available then.) 1gb RAMBUS/RDRAM Pre 2000 XP system with Synapse on it and at most it only hits 5% cpu usage.
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