Since you don't intend to mine any significant amount of bitcoin, it would make more sense to run it at a lower usage level . That will save you some money on electricity and it reduce the wear and tear. On the other hand, you will probably get bored and stop mining after a week, so you might as well crank it up to full capacity for now just for the experience.
I'd say that even mining for the experience really isn't worth it (in most cases even shares for large pools will take glacially forever depending on share difficulty).
As for running bitcoin-core (since I can't assume that OP is mining, and for all we know they may be increasing temps from validating a ton of transactions on a fast network) the load will drop once you're synched to the chain, and core is often run 24/7 anyway (since it provides transaction/chain relay and validation to the network).