[anonymars]

You're implying that if you don't run the CPU at high power and high heat it won't have problems, and that undervolting or underclocking will prevent damage. This is not correct: while that is helpful, Vmin degradation occurs during idle or light activity as well

Vmin will creep up, and the headroom for undervolting will degrade. It will affect the high clocks first (they demand the highest voltage), which is why dropping the max boost multiplier a step or two can also work around it (at the cost of basically downgrading it to a cheaper processor)

[Numerlor]

Idle and light load is bad for degradation only because that's the most common scenario where the boosting algorith will actually go to the highest clocks. More loaded cores will have the CPU target lower clocks on all cores so that it actually can get the power for it and have the CPU be coolable, but if you're idle and then some task loads just a single core for a bit the CPU will boost it the highest it can. The voltage spikes from those boosts will cause local hotspots even if the CPU is cool overall

[anonymars]

Or perhaps it is more complicated than that

"Even under idle conditions at relatively cool temperatures, sporadic elevated voltages are observed when the processor is resumed from low power states in order to service background operations before entering a low power state again."

https://www.igorslab.de/en/search-for-the-solution-to-raptor...