[billti]

If you’re a dev (as I’m sure many here are), many big builds will max all cores for extended times. I had to up the cooling in my machine as building Chromium would regularly peg all 8 core for hours, causing thermal throttling to kick in and lower clock speeds.

[rbanffy]

Sometimes I manage to extract a little more performance by shutting down virtual cores to get lower thermal stress and better cache hit ratios. It's a very YMMV thing that depends on pretty much everything from the CPU microarchitecture and built-in power management all the way to the size of the fan, whether you polished the heat spreader on the CPU to the programs you are running and what the data they are processing looks like.