I understand the increased degradation of parts over time, but what is the heat doing to make a computer perform worse in real time?
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The heat doesn’t affect performance directly, but processors are programmed to throttle their own activity if they get too hot to avoid damaging themselves. After all, when there’s not enough ventilation, you’d probably prefer a slower computer than the CPU burning out.
The computer slows itself down when overheated to prevent actual damage happening. Since heat is produced by the computer circuits performing their thing, slowing them down means there will be less heat produced.
Heat shouldn’t really make a computer perform worse, until it fails. At which point it likely stops working completely.
However most computers understand that running to failure isnt a good idea and have sensors to monitor temperature and limit their processing if they’re getting too hot so they don’t fry themselves.
There may be some minor changes in performance with temperature, as electrical properties can change. But I don’t think any consumer level computer would need to worry about that. It’s going to be the self limiting that you’ll notice.
While fan controllers and chips themselves are very good at regulating temperature it is because chips work effectively below certain temperatures and irreversibly degrade after certain temperatures. After all silicon and other semiconductors have thermal expansion, a melting point and autoignition points just like any other material.
The mechanism is called “thermal throttling”. It reduces speed so it will make less heat. A lot of modern systems will shut down when they reach critical temperature to prevent catastrophic failure.
One aspect not mentioned yet is that higher temperatures make the temperature increase even worse: most components have higher resistance at higher temperatures, meaning that you need more power for the same things, and all that power gets turned into more heat.
2 things:
* Modern computers are programmed to slow themselves once overheated, to not reach critical levens that would damage it.
* Resistance increases with temperature, and the higher the resistance, the larger proportions of the energy is wasted on heat, *meaning the hotter your computer gets, the more heat it generates for the same tasks.* This leads to the previous point earlier.
Getting better cooling means the computer starts getting hotter later, so overall it can do more work under lower temperatures, meaning even less heat generated.
What people tend to forget is that the chip creates heat because things *are moving* inside the chip. It is on the quantum level, but things are moving and that is what gives the chip the ability to pass electricity and not pass electricity. Because it moves at the speed of light, we don’t perceive any time passing but it is happening and the movement causes heat. The problem is that a MOSFET doped transistor will cease to function properly at 175 degrees Celsius, since a chip is made up of billions of those things if they don’t work right the whole computer will stop functioning properly.
So computer component manufacturers develop cooling technologies and software that will throttle the components back to avoid damaging them. When you feel the computer moving more sluggishly, that is what is happening.
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