My dual-core FreeBSD laptop is compiling Chromium, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Libreoffice, and currently has a load average of 20.53. And... it's still perfectly functional for writing code, web browsing, watching youtube, etc.
#ThanksFreeBSD
Have you tweaked anything to keep it responsive? When I was running FreeBSD on a quad core i7-6700K desktop machine the cursor and audio would stutter under heavy loads.