You’re overreacting. There is no hardware at risk and neither there is any damage being done to hardware. It’s actually slightly more damaging for hardware if clock is ramping up and down like crazy, changing voltages constantly than running at 100% clock at all times (which also degrades chip a bit, but then again, normal operation does as well and I have yet to see a CPU that has died from wearing out).
Again, CPU running at full clock DOESN’T equal CPU running at full load. If it’s just running at max clock at all times, it’s just that, it’s keeping its core clock at high level.
Like I’ve said, avast! is switching back to original mode unless you interrupt it, either by a system crash or possibly with a game crash. In which case, avast! will treat currently set High Performance power plan as current plan and will not switch it.
That being said, you did bring a valid point here and I think I know how it could be addressed. Power plan selection in Game Mode and avast! reading the power plan state when installed. This way, no matter if game/system crashes, it would always switch to the correct power plan on next system boot or when exiting a game next time, because it would have it defined in its settings unlike now where it always switches to High performance and switches back to last used profile before the switch. It that already happened to be High performance (because it stayed that way after system crash), it’ll just stay with High Performance forever.
I’ll forward this idea to the devs. For the time being, switch to Balanced mode manually in Power Settings and turn OFF “Trigger high performance” in Performance → Game Mode → Settings panel. This way you’ll still have some benefits of the game mode without the power plan switching.
EDIT:
Ok, I’ve just posted this idea on the dev board. Lets see how it goes.