Does it matter if CPU utilization never goes above 30%?

[yepimonfire]

Or are you essentially deriving no benefit? I would assume if it's sampled in blocks, and I opened a program or a website and the reporting app said it used 25% of the cpu for that sample block (1 second) that means the whole operation on the CPU's end took 250ms, vs if it peaked to 100% it would take 1 second, therefore it's faster or does it not work that way?

 

[Gam3r01]

CPU load has nothing to do with time/latency.
Load depends on what you are doing, however if you never surpass 99% usage you are technically fine. (99-100% signifies your processor is working its full potential).
In this case, if an app uses 30% it just means it took 30% of your CPUs available performance for that tic, it could have taken 60 and been exactly the same to you. If that process took 60% while the processor was already at 50% load it would then take longer/perform worse.

 

[bystander]

Or are you essentially deriving no benefit? I would assume if it's sampled in blocks, and I opened a program or a website and the reporting app said it used 25% of the cpu for that sample block (1 second) that means the whole operation on the CPU's end took 250ms, vs if it peaked to 100% it would take 1 second, therefore it's faster or does it not work that way?

That's not exactly how it works.

Your CPU usage is how much of the entire CPU that is used, but there are multiple cores that make up that CPU. If you had a 4 core CPU, and the app that you used only uses 1 core, then at full usage, the app will show 25% CPU usage. You may also find that the application accesses the HDD, and while waiting for data to load, it may have to wait idle until it has its data. It may be waiting on data from the internet, or other resources. These idle moments may happen many times per second, so it's not exactly performing the action in 250ms, but rather it works for 5ms 50 times a second with small breaks.

 

[CountMike]

Get a slower processor, it will be utilized more.