Overheating causing throttling?

[Stephie_Girl]

So a PC I built for a friend, well for her hubby and her backup PC was described to me as I throttling.  She said it was slowly done and skipping every now and then.  Especially under load in World of Wacraft.  I have the settings set to high with shadows on good, SSAO disabled, AF on x4 and AA on x1.  She said it was zigzagging every now and then and sounded like overheating.  During this conversation she mentioned her PC was on carpet (bottom mounted PSU fan intaking from the bottom).  So I told her it NEEDS to be on wood and the past 3-4 days it's been fine.  Can an overheating power supply causing throttling?  My theory was it pulls power output back to avoid damage which would in turn throttle back CPU or GPU power wise.

[skullbringer]

Yes, that was most likely the problem

[helping]

that's certainly something new I've never heard of. I would assume the PSU would just go to 100% and then shut down if too hot.

[Youbetternot]

[Stephie_Girl]

that's certainly something new I've never heard of. I would assume the PSU would just go to 100% and then shut down if too hot.

In 2013, they put so much fail safe protocals built into hardware that rather than chance it not shutting down quickly enough, CPU's and GPU's I know throttle a full 10-15*C before point of damaging so it slows down the ramp up so once it hits that point the chance of damaging it while it shuts down is low.