Active&Passive cooling policy difference?

[sample text]

hey,can someone tell me what's the difference between the Active and the Passive cooling mode in the power management?I saw the tooltip,but it sounds dumb....I need some better explanation in more understandable and noobish language.I guess Active = the fans start to tryhard to cool my CPU,Passive = it makes my CPU slower to prevent from getting hot?By default it's set to Passive,should I change it to Active?

[SpaceGhostC2C]

It controls how much the fans are used to cool the CPU. I don't think it has much bearing on desktops, since you can manage that way more precisely using the motherboard's tools or third party software. It's more of a thing for laptops, but the behavior isn't consistent from model to model. In some laptops, "passive" seems to mean not turning the fan on at all, while in others it seems to mean "tolerate higher temps before turning the fan on, wait longer to ramp up the fan speed".

 

It doesn't affect your CPU performance (other than by thermal throttling if you set it to "passive" and then run Prime95 or something like that). However, windows typically defaults to "active" when plugged in and "passive" when running off battery, to increase battery life, and the CPU speed itself is usually lowered for the same reason when on battery (in the "balanced" power plan, that is).