Dropping to 50% takes me to 165 F, which is not much drop.
Pausing WCG drops to 123 F.
I guess I need to educate myself on this stuff. Never paid any attention to temps before.

For all my machines I keep the CPU temperature below 60°C in Winter and below 65°C in Summer (no air conditioning).
I only have air cooling (no water cooling).
The quality of the CPU cooler as well as keeping the machine inside clean (dust free) are the two key-success factors.
For the Raspberry Pi (in this case RPi 3 B with semi-passive cooling), I run only 3 cores.

78°C seems to me being too hot, even for a laptop.
Cheers,
Yves

I run 4 consumer grade B350 mainboards with Ryzen 1700/2700 (1 Asrock AB350m and 3 Asus B350M-K). One of them runs since almost 3 years 24/7, the others since a bit more than 2 years. No problems so far.

Luck might also play a role, but I think the most important thing for running hardware on WCG reliably is to moderate clock rates. My systems are limited to base clock rate and undervolted, CPU temperatures never reach more than 60 °C even in the summer (CPU coolers are the boxed coolers that came with it, so nothing special here either). The relatively low currents put also not much stress on the components of the mainboard (especially the VRMs).
Another plus that comes with it is high energy efficiency. I could overclock my CPU to the max and have a bit higher output, but energy consumption would skyrocket.

I forgot #5
Use the smallest operating system you are comfortable with to free system resources.

I use Puppy64

Sheridon, if you look at my post again I said M2 NVME, not M2 sata SSD.

They are different animals. Plugging into a pcie slot just to power a sata SSD that still goes through the sata interface anyway doesn't make a lot of sense unless you just want the sata SSD mounted on the board.