It's not about overheating in a case, as much as the components' (CPU and GPU) boost mechanics. The cooler they are, the faster they go. They don't run at a fixed level upto the maximum safe temp and then suddenly drop off.
For Ryzen CPUs, every 5 degrees or so apparently they lose a chunk of frequency.
www.gamersnexus.net
You can see almost a couple hundred MHz difference between 75 degrees and 50 degrees
With Nvidia GPUs, they try to boost themselves beyond the rated boost frequency, but drop some of that extra frequency as the temp increases, with multiple steps. So my RTX 2060 has a rated boost clock of 1830 MHz. When gaming it will typically go to 1920MHz. When running Folding@home with another GPU also in the case, it will be able to sustain boost clocks of around 1905MHz as it hits ~70 degrees. Taking the side panel off the case sees that rise to 1935, over 100MHz above the rated boost clock. Because it gets more fresh air to cool itself, and temps are kept lower (~65 degrees).
So while most cases don't cause thermal throttling in the 'old' sense, modern components will generally try to boost themselves as far as they can while there is still the thermal and power headroom to allow it.
Thus decent airflow is needed to 'unlock' the performance that those components want to give
For Ryzen CPUs, every 5 degrees or so apparently they lose a chunk of frequency.
Coolers & Cases Really Matter for Ryzen 3000 CPUs | Thermal Scaling & Frequency | GamersNexus
stub In some ways, AMD has become NVIDIA, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The way new Ryzen CPUs scale is behaviorally similar to the way GPU Boost 4.0 scales on GPUs, where simply lowering the silicon operating temperature will directly affect performance and clock speeds. Under complete...
With Nvidia GPUs, they try to boost themselves beyond the rated boost frequency, but drop some of that extra frequency as the temp increases, with multiple steps. So my RTX 2060 has a rated boost clock of 1830 MHz. When gaming it will typically go to 1920MHz. When running Folding@home with another GPU also in the case, it will be able to sustain boost clocks of around 1905MHz as it hits ~70 degrees. Taking the side panel off the case sees that rise to 1935, over 100MHz above the rated boost clock. Because it gets more fresh air to cool itself, and temps are kept lower (~65 degrees).
So while most cases don't cause thermal throttling in the 'old' sense, modern components will generally try to boost themselves as far as they can while there is still the thermal and power headroom to allow it.
Thus decent airflow is needed to 'unlock' the performance that those components want to give
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