Keeping your PC and laptop cool: avoiding overheating and loss of performance

That’s why you should put your computer through a heat check: This way, you can ensure that it continues to run at its usual speed even under thermal stress and that the lifespan of its components isn’t reduced.

First, use suitable tools to check just how hot your PC or laptop actually gets. These results will reveal whether your computer has a heat problem at all and whether you can solve it with free immediate help or additional internal and external cooling components.

In most cases, a few measurements, targeted maintenance, and the correct Windows settings are enough to ensure you always keep your computer’s temperatures under control, even in the height of summer.

Heat slows things down, but it doesn’t break anything

First, the good news: An overheated PC does not, as a rule, crash immediately and without warning. Modern processors and graphics cards have built-in protection: If a chip approaches its maximum temperature, it reduces its clock speed and voltage — a process known as thermal throttling. This allows the components to reduce their power consumption, which in turn means less waste heat that the cooling system has to remove from the case.

Thermal throttling is noticeable as a drop in speed: Programs start more slowly, copying large files takes longer, and the frame rate in games plummets. In an overheated laptop, the CPU clock speed can even drop by a quarter.

Only when even this performance throttling is no longer sufficient does the hardware switch itself off as a last resort. However, this emergency shutdown (thermal shutdown) almost never occurs in practice, because users usually close computationally intensive applications or switch off the PC beforehand due to the significantly reduced performance.