How does the temperature of a computer effect its performance?
In: Technology
GPUs and CPUs have a maximum temperature. If they ever go above that, they will automatically throttle themselves, which will reduce performance, until it cools back down. This is usually 90C.
These days CPUs have a sort of automatic overclocking (eg, “Turbo Boost”), in which the CPU is able to run a bit faster for a short time, if it’s cool enough.
Other than that, in normal conditions, temperature doesn’t really matter. Whether your system is at 40C or 50C makes little difference — it’s within spec, and it will run at full power. The main reason to want low temps is to have a margin for times of 100% usage. If you can run your CPU at 100% constantly without it coming close to overheating, you’re doing fine.
Arguably, a high CPU temperature can cause premature failure, but it seems like an unlikely thing to worry about unless you want to keep it running for a decade with really high temperatures. That might be a consideration for some special purpose devices in a cramped, fanless case, but seems unlikely to be an issue for a desktop computer.
Where people really obsess about temperature is overclocking, where you try to push things absolutely as far as they will go, and there getting as cold as possible may allow you to get a bit more performance out of it.
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