Similarly, processors convert thermal headroom to performance, until they run out of thermal headroom. So if you improve the cooling on a processor that has work to do (rather than sleeping), it will use up that cooling and perform better, rather than performing the same and running cooler.
(Mobile processors operate differently, since they need to maintain a much tighter thermal envelope to not burn the user. And processors can also target power levels rather than thermals. But when a processor is in its default "run as fast as possible" mode, its normal operating temperature will be close to the 100C limit.)
This is really no excuse to have Windows eating 12GB of RAM with an Edge (with 2 static tabs), excel some antivirus and Teams running. This (12GB) is just sick.
If you have free ram the OS will cache all the recently accessed things. It costs effectively zero to cache them when you access them, and it costs effectively zero to evict from the cache if you actually need the memory for "useful" work. And if the cached thing is useful in the mean time, you win because RAM is still orders of magnitude faster than SSD. None of the scenarios are a perf loss. The only scenarios are "win" or "no gain."
"But won't the next application I load, load faster if there is free RAM?"
If you are asking this question, please refer back to the previous concept -- "it costs effectively zero to evict from the cache if you actually need the memory for 'useful' work." This is where people typically get confused. They think it takes work to evict things from the cache, just like it would require work to remove frequently used objects from your physical desk if you needed to free up space.
Once you understand that the rest should fall into place.
Unless you take reliability into account.
It might look insane compared to what you were used
to seeing a decade ago, but it's actually not that crazy.
It doesn't go past 45C even during Prime95 runs using all cores. And the 120mm fans aren't exactly howling either.
First, the temperature sensors got a lot better. Previously
you only had one sensor per core/cpu, and it was placed wherever
there was space - nowadays it'll have dozens of sensors placed
in the most likely hotspots.
First, the temperature sensors got a lot better. Previously you only had one sensor per core/cpu, and it was placed wherever there was space - nowadays it'll have dozens of sensors placed in the most likely hotspots. A decade ago a 70C temp meant that some parts of the CPU were closer to 90C, whereas nowadays a 90C temp means the hottest part is actually 90C.
Second, the better sensors allow more accurate tuning. While 100C might be totally fine, 120C is probably already going to cause serious damage. The problem here is that you can't just rely on a somewhat-distant sensor to always be a constant 20C below the peak value: it's also going to be lagging a bit. It might take a tenth of a second for that temp spike in the hotspot to reach the sensor, but in the time between the spike starting and the temp at the sensor raising enough to trigger a downthrottle you could've already caused serious damage. A decade ago that meant leaving some margin for safety, but these days they can just keep going right up to the limit.
It's also why overclocking simply isn't really a "thing" anymore. Previous CPUs had plenty of safety margin left for risk-takers to exploit, modern CPUs use up all that margin by automatically overclocking until it hits either a temperature limit or a power draw limit.