can heat slow down your computer?

[ceratite]

can heat slow your computer down and make it run slower?

[Master Disaster]

Yes, it's called thermal throttling.

[vanished]

Only indirectly.  Performance won't be worse at 80 C vs 40 C for example, but if it gets too hot it will reduce power (and thus performance) to prevent it from getting any hotter, which is called thermal throttling.

[voiha]

https://www.techspot.com/article/1638-what-is-thermal-throttling/

[Jurrunio]

Yes, but the new stuff do it in two steps.

 

1. Losing turbo/boost frequency. This is especially prominent in Nvidia GPU Boost 3 GPUs, as seen in frequency/temperature graph of blower cards (for example the reference cards) in which frequency will dip as much as possible to keep the GPU temperature below 85C. It's operation is quite smooth, that's why it has to come in earlier than thermal throttling.

 

2. Thermal throttling. This one doesnt come in as common as the first one since the activation point is higher (95-100C), but when it does it axes the clock speed heavily, causing judders when it's bouncing between on and off.