Hello.  I built my own DAW (Intel i5 3570 CPU; Asus P8Z77V-LX mobo, SATA drives: 16 gb memory; Win 7 x64).  I use Sonar X2a.
 
Many DAW tweakers suggest disabling processor throttling or SpeedStepping in the bios, and I have done that in my system.  I would like to monitor CPU temperatures from my Desktop, and Asus provides some handy software to do that, and also software that will adjust fan speeds and energy usage in the computer.
 
So my question is: do using utilities that adjust fan speed or reducing power usage by the computer interfere with recording processes and degrade computer performance (as SpeedStepping is thought to do)?
 
Thanks

Fan speed utilities should not affect performance, and will result in a quieter DAW. If you are trying to cut power use by the processor, you are by default (see law of conservation of energy) going to have to make the processor do less per cycle or slow down the number of cycles/second i. e. degrade performance.

Ok.  So it sounds like I should be ok with adjusting fan speed, and leave the power usage adjustments alone.
 
Thanks for the helpful reply Slart.

Sorry to disagree but i would avoid at all costs, specially in laptops, running monitoring software while doing any sound related stuff.
On laptops specially with switchable graphics this is asking for troubles, it will keep turning on and off your dedicated graphic card causing huge dpc spikes.
Also sometimes those apps connect to your mbo EC and other sensors causing ACPI to make huge DPC spikes.