PC Gaming

Thermal problems are much less likely to kill hardware than they used to be. CPU manufacturers have got much better at avoiding microfractures caused by thermal stress (e.g. by making sure that everything in the CPU expands at the same rate when heated) and failures from electromigration (where the atoms in the CPU move because of applied voltage and stop being parts of transistors and traces, which happens faster at higher temperatures). Ten or twenty years ago, it was really bad for chips to swing between low and high temperatures a lot due to thermal stress, and bad for them to stay at above 90°C for a long time due to electromigration, but now heat makes so little difference that modern CPUs dynamically adjust their frequency to stay between 99.0° and 99.9° under load by default. The main benefit of extra cooling these days is that you can stay at a higher frequency for longer without exceeding the temperature limit, so get better average performance, but unless your cooling solution is seriously overspecced, the CPU will be above 99.0° under load a lot of the time either way and the motherboard just won't ramp the fan up to maximum.