In accordance with embodiments of the present disclosure, a system may include a cooling subsystem for cooling components of an information handling system and a thermal manager communicatively coupled to the cooling subsystem. The thermal manager may be configured to receive information regarding a reference performance metric for the cooling subsystem, based on the reference performance metric, modify at least one thermal control parameter for thermally controlling the information handling system from a baseline setting associated with a hardware configuration of the information handling system, and thermally control the information handling system in accordance with the at least one thermal control parameter as modified.