I come from a production environment. If a system becomes unresponsive people were not getting their work done. If a system became unavailable the company lost thousands of dollars per MINUTE. From my perspective trying to save seconds by extreme overclocking or tweaking priorities does little good if it brings the machine down while I am not there to notice and get it going again and then loosing maybe hours.

While a few seconds here and there do add up over time they are easily lost with a machine down for even a few hours. Will playing with the "nice" setting cause unstabilty or lost time? Does not look like it so far but there are still things going on that no one here so far has an explanation for. So I don't know.

This is from my perspective and that is how I judge. Does not mean it is right for you. You should do whatever you feel is best and hopefully it will prove to have been the best for you. I will always choose the middle path, mild overclock with mild temps and a bump in priority. Hopefully it will prove to have been the best choice for me.

I still want to know what causes CEP2 to run at a lower priority and whey changing settings does not always take. Linux seldom needs a reboot as Windows does. Usually just a kernel change so that is not it.