How does "CPU Thermal Throttle" work?

Question

I have an AMD FX-6300 CPU and an ASRock 970 Pro3 R2.0 motherboard with an American Megatrends version P1.0 BIOS. The BIOS has an option for CPU Thermal Throttling which can be disabled, can be set to auto, or can be set to a percentage (12%, 25%, etc) and it defaults to auto. From what I understand, this option will slow down the CPU if the temperature gets too high. But what I don't understand is the meaning of the percentages.

What happens when I set CPU Thermal Throttling to a percentage like 25% ?

Answer 1

Check here for info on how CPU throttle themselves:

the percentage refers to how much of the total capacity can be reduced when a thermal threshold is reached. by using 25%, you are telling it to reduce your CPU's clock multiplier to approximately 75% of its normal maximum value. Auto would presumably adjust the percentage based on how effective the throttling is in controlling the temperature.

EG a 4GHZ cpu (a 100Mhz chip and a 40x clock multiplier) would reduce the multiplier to 30x (75% of 40x) and the resulting total frequency would drop to 3Ghz.