Should CPU utilisation be this high???

With DaVinci Resolve Studio v17.2.1, using the NVIDIA encoder should my CPU utilisation be around 44%???. I thought 95% of the work load should be passed to my GPU??

I have a i7-2600k and GTX1070 btw

Images that go to encoding have to come from somewhere, cpu could be used for decoding your source material, for doing some processing (Fusion effects etc) and so on.

Yes i understand that but using almost half the CPU power, thats not normal right?

That said the CPU is getting on, and i really want to upgrade but the GPU situation has put a stop to that atm

Normal is very relative, what is your source footage? If for example decoding source is 10x more processing intensive than encoding and is nicely multithreaded you might see near 100% utilization of cpu too.

source is a 1440p 60fps H264 capture

A i7-2600k is relatively old (2011) for a cpu , 60 fps h264 is relatively heavy so combined with some other stuff the CPU has to do (scaling, CC, keeping the machine purring) 44 % doesn't sound abnormal.

Proxies could help you somewhat (in your next project)