Found out that I have been torturing my CPU for the past two+ years... My PC is a very compact case (NZXT H1). It would spin up the biggest fan, which is the CPU all-in-one watercooled fan, pretty fast and would stay constant at that loud level. I was under the assumption that a temperature sensor was broken and that it would just go up too soon.

What I did not know until yesterday was that my CPU fan was spinning entirely uselessly because the waterpump was turned off. So my poor poor CPU would get any load, its temperature would rise to 100C, and it would attempt oh so vigourously up the the AIO fan's RPM. The water pump, not impressed by this, wouldn't budge. So my CPU has been thermal throttled to a measly 799hz for god knows how much. No wonder VR minigolf is too much of an ask for my system, dropping frames left and right at a cinematic 25-35fps.

I was this close to buying a new AIO cooler after debugging all this with o3. It however was smart enough to suggest "hey, could you just double check to see if the cables are connected properly?" after which I discovered that the pump and the fan were plugged into each others slots in the motherboard. An easy five minute swap & fan curve change later and now my PC is FINALLY quiet and runs 120fps of whatever I throw at it. Turns out that 120hz minigolf has ball physics as smooth as a physics undergrad modeling a cow.