I have an MSI-6712 motherboard and it came with PC Alert 4 CD which has all the monitoring functions voltage/temps/cpu speed/mem speed etc. However it also had CoolerXP on it which was a programme that cools your cpu.
Basically its a low priority task that issues a HALT instruction to the CPU and reduces its activity and consequently power consumption. (the CPU is always burning cycles even when it doesnt seem like it).
Because the application is a low priority task, it gets bumped whenever another program requests CPU cycles. Theoretically, such a program should have no effect on system performance except during CPU 'idling'
a similar system monitoring programme for intel boards is
Intel boards