this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Certain workloads can't just magically cause your CPU to get "unusually" hot. It's true that some instruction sets can cause greater thermal loads than others, but disabling the relevant instruction sets is only likely to make it worse, as the CPU will then complete the work using other less efficient instructions.
A CPU will run as hot as it needs to to do whatever it is doing, up to whatever its safe temperature is, at which point it will slow down to protect itself. Running at this "max" temp is not a problem. CPUs will run as fast and hot as they safely can, and no hotter.
Presumably the emulated games are simply framerate and resolution limited, where the normal PC games may not be.
That said, there are some things you can do, assuming the CPU doesn't actually need to work as hard as it is to run the games you are playing.
You might also look into undervolting the system. This involves lowering the voltage used by the CPU. This can allow it to run cooler without sacrificing performance, but can cause system instability.
Using battery saver disables turbo boost, so it never goes to 3Ghz, which means it doesnt go to 90c that quickly anymore. Thanks for making me remember battery saver exists!
They talked about Turbo Boost. Disabling it on my machine has been such a drastic game changer that the CPU actually runs better without it and the system is smoother under heavy workloads.
Disabling Turbo Boost falls under limiting power/clock speed.
Turbo Boost is just a dynamic overclock, as such, disabling it is essentially an underclock. It can indeed result in a smoother experience by virtue of reducing thermal throttling. Thermal limits can reduce clocks much more drastically while waiting for the CPU to cool, than running it at lower but not-as-hot clockrate to begin with.
This is especially true for for weaker cooling systems that take longer to get the temps back down when the CPU hits max, meaning it can take a second before the CPU is back to normal speed. An underclock in such a case is beneficial.