It’s actually been happening quite a bit lately.
Cooling and fan speeds are controlled by software. Often bios or things like chipset or gpu firmware. Basically there are predefined curves for fan speed vs component temperature. This temp fans off/low, this temp fans medium, this temp fans high. Hotter the component gets higher the fan goes, usually in preset steps. If those aren’t set right the fans won’t ramp up as heat goes up. Or won’t blow the appropriate amount of air given the heat generated. And you end up overheated or throttled when you shouldn’t be. The cooling can handle the heat. The cooling just doesn’t kick in.
Update that bit of software and things can be fine.
There’s been a couple of GPUs out in the last 2 years where the default fan curve was set badly. Some early amd/ryzen motherboard’s shipped with bios that had bad default fan curves. There’s been some issues with windows over riding or interfering with fan speeds set with certain parts. And driver bugs where manually setting fans would basically force a broken fan curve.
All pretty easily fixed with software updates.
It’s usually pretty easily identifiable though. There are simple ways of checking fan speed and you can see it’s not speeding up when it should. Even without that you can hear it. So this may be less of a bug than “we set the fan curve too conservatively because we wanted low noise”. Which also happens.
See above. Near as I can tell they’ve just tweaked when the fan starts going, And how fast it goes. The “missing digital key” would appear to refer to a step in the fan curve. Probably missing whatever tells the fans to go to Max when it crosses a certain temperature. Or they added a higher speed to the top of the curve to compensate for heat they didn’t expect.
