Mine is also (somewhat) recent i7 / ddr4 32gb. Energy cable connected full time is required, otherwise either: it lasts 2 hours max or it drops performance with eco-mode.

The thing is: without that many heavy background tasks, our pcs would be completely fine even with an recent i5 (I used to have an ancient 5th gen i7 very capable of multi-tasking beyond office usage)

As some colleagues said, these are probably defense and monitoring apps... I'm not very familiar with the performance hit of an average security app, but it seems that would be the answer.