Does performance per watt decrease with high temperature?

[pleniluneorg]

Electricity here is expensive, so I'm interested to know if/how much temperature affects CPU/GPU performance. Is the influence big enough to justify spending lots of money on cooling?

 

[killster1]

It effects it NONE! hahahaha, you think a dry ice rig running at -200 and a cpu going at 65C going to run any diff at 4ghz? nope. what you might want to do is to put the exhaust outside if you want to cool your house more, and in winter use your computer as a heater

 

[EarthwormJim]

Performance per watt is affected. As you increase the temperature of a GPU/CPU, you also increase it's power consumption.

Performance per watt decreases with an increase in temperature, however absolute performance does not decrease unless you start getting into the realm of throttling temperatures.

 

[Binky]

A larger cooler (or more fans) would generally consume more power by itself. That seems counterproductive.