Lately I was trying to record some gameplay from my laptop using MSI afterburner. The game was old and was easily hitting 100+ FPS, so I recorded with x264vfw with fast settings at 90FPS.
The game dropped to around 60-70fps, and the CPU almost immediately hit 100°C and throttled to like half the clock than normal. Is this normal? The CPU in question is i7 12650H, normal clocks are around 4.2GHz, at worst case during recording it dipped to 2.7GHz.
Considering YouTube and Twitch can't show greater than 60 fps, there's really not much point to going higher unless you're trying to get higher quality slow-mo footage.
If you're still thermal throttling, you may want to consider 30 fps.
fast is still consider intensive encoding, so if you want to record higher fps you need to use veryfast. Without hardware based codec everything will be running on CPU so it's normal to go full steam.