Modern processors are meant to push the wall. By default, they’re usually set to very high performance on their stock voltage/frequency curves. But what often happens is that if you don’t (and many times even if you do) have a monstrous cooler, the CPU hits it’s thermal limits before it hits its performance limits. This means the processor starts thermal throttling, or dropping out of high-end boost modes much quicker. The throttling modes often drop a tremendous amount of performance.

Counter-intuitively, it’s often in your best interest to keep a processor running slightly cooler (or even slower!) for longer than it is to hit your thermal maxes.

One of the best ways to do this are to use the power/frequency curves in most modern processors to slightly undervolt your processor. AMD has Curve Optimizer that lets you slightly tweak down voltages for a particular frequency. If stable, this usually results in higher performance with lower power consumption. Intel also has this available.

I also try to keep my processors cool. Throttling from hitting the thermal max almost always results in worse performance that running slightly slower and staying at consistent high clocks.

The author of this article did exactly that. In his case, he was able to do exactly that.