Heat slows things down, but it doesn’t break anythingFirst, 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. 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. 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.