Question 12th Gen I5 heat problem

[Tjudawous]

I custom built this PC about a 2 years ago. It was capable of running two, maybe three games at once without any thermal throttling. Plenty of headroom from 100C.

In the past few months, I've noticed even 1 game now pushes 80C where previously it might have been 50 or 60 at most. I'll post system specs but I do want to mention I have a Lian Li 360mm galahad water cooler. If I try to run a 2nd game in the background like, say even something at LOWEST resouiltion at 640x480 or something hilariously dinky, it spikes badly. I tried Genshin Impact with Destiny 2 and it hit 90C. You can see in the HWiNFO cap below that at some point it hit 100C and started throttling. FPS and Windows performance just tanked at that point.

https://imgur.com/RGyxeMy

What I have tried:

• Checking and monitoring pump RPM, it stays steady and does not change with system temp (attached picture of HWinFo with graphs that contains RPM info of AIO cooler)
• Open and disassembled case and dusted all fans, filters
• Disassembled and cleaned then re-thermal-pasted the water cooler to the CPU again (this helped for a short amount of time it seemed but its hot again)
  • It's probably worth mentioning here that the default paste pad on the water cooler seemed to make a mess and cleaning it really sucked
• Updated GPU drivers (GPU never seems to be thermal throttling that I can tell)
• Disabled most of the LEDs in the case to try to reduce overall heat

I'm not sure if it's an over-voltage problem. I had watched a video recently about Gamer Nexus stating that ASUS ROG MBs are overheating CPUs I'm just not sure if that includes intel I5 12th Gens.

Here's some screenshots of diagnostic info I've been running. You can see the drop in temp when I tab out of a game, even though its still on the 1st monitor.

Core Temp while in-game:

https://imgur.com/S7hfLPh

HWiNFO screenshots:

https://imgur.com/ZwxwvNh

https://imgur.com/sTh29s4

https://imgur.com/uM33mCI

Lastly, here's something that I found rather inconsistent and confusing: The AIO LianLi pump software shows this:

https://imgur.com/XsQa5KK

I don't understand why it's showing 2070 RPM, this doesn't seem to match with any value I see on HWiNFO cap. This RPM only varies +/0 maybe 10 or 15 RPM at any given time. The temps do update periodically, just not often.

I don't have eighty browser tabs open, maybe between 5-10 chrome tabs at MOST while playing, and discord. I don't have much running in the background either.

Does anyone here have any suggestions I can try? My questions are this:

• Could this be an over-voltage problem from the ASUS MB? I have not pulled the latest ASUS Bios update but after hearing Gamer Nexus video about it, I don't think I should.
• Could the pump be dying? It's always showing a consistent pump RPM and the fans are always running

Any suggestions, tips would be greatly appreciated. I'd like to try to troubleshoot before dumping another $200 on a new /different water cooler. Will provide any additional information you think might be helpful, just let me know. Thanks for your time.

 

[Phaaze88]

Could the pump be dying? It's always showing a consistent pump RPM and the fans are always running

Doesn't mean anything if fluid flow happens to be hindered by organic material inside the loop.
Low flow rate is a weakness of AIO/CLCs as it is.

Does anyone here have any suggestions I can try?

Run Cinebench R23's thermal test. Feel both hoses while the test is going on.
If flow is poor, you will notice a clear difference in how each one feels - which is the opposite response of what it should be.
If flow is poor, RMA the cooler if it's still within warranty. If not, buy another cooler.
FYI, all AIOs will eventually clog up - if the pump doesn't die first - it's just a matter of when. If you're ok with that, feel free to buy another one.