Question Advice on undervolting i5 4590

[GUMSHi]

I recently got a PC with an i5 4590 and when gaming it would reach 70+ degrees C, sometimes even reaching 80. HWINFO doesn't say that it's thermal throttling and I don't really see any decrease in performance, however it still worries me as this chip is old and I don't want to stress it too much. I then found out that undervolting is a thing and while it is more common to do for laptops, I was wondering if I could improve my temps by undervolting my CPU as well. Until I came across this thread on LTT forums of someone apparently killing their i5 4440 and now I'm hesitant.

Any thoughts? I will say that the case doesn't exactly provide a good airflow and it only has one 80mm fan as an exhaust, add to that the fact that I might need to replace the thermal paste as well (intel stock cooler also, yay). I think undervolting is simply more appealing due to the fact that it's free. I do plan on adding more fans and changing the thermal paste soon but again, if undervolting can give me significant improvement in temps, I'd like to try it.

Sorry if this got a bit wordy, just wanted to communicate how I think of things.

 

[rgd1101]

what the cpu cooler? did you redo the thermal paste?

 

[GUMSHi]

what the cpu cooler? did you redo the thermal paste?

Intel stock cooler. No I haven't, but I do plan to do that next week

 

[lordmogul]

Afaik they're from the period when Intel used thermal paste under the heatspreader instead of soldering it on. Which is worse at transferring heat from the CPU die to the heatspreader. So you could have a gigantic highend cooler, but the head simply doesn't reach it and get's stuck earlier in the chain (die -> heatspreader -> cooler) On my old 3rd gen i5 I replace the paste with liquid metal, which gave me about 10-15°C less. But it's risky and you can break the thing while doing it.

Keep in mind that 70°C and even 80°C isn't anything dangerous. Sure, it's hot, hotter than many would be comfortable with, but not to the point where something breaks. The fact that it isn't throttling shows that the CPU itself thinks it's perfectly fine like that. I've seen laptops idling at that range. And both, the mentioned 3rd gen i5 and my old Core 2 rig for tinkering can and will run at those temperatures when overclocked.

People in the LTT thread you linked also say that VCCIN should be higher than the other voltages, and the OP there reduced that one. So keep that in mind.
In most cases simply reducing Vcore shouldn't cause any harm. Just as with overclocking you sort of change the ratio of voltage to clock, so it might become unstable, but that is something do be dialed in step by step anyway. You could take a look at any oc tutorial, but instead of increasing things, you decrease it, the same way to test stability applies.

 

[GUMSHi]

Afaik they're from the period when Intel used thermal paste under the heatspreader instead of soldering it on. Which is worse at transferring heat from the CPU die to the heatspreader. So you could have a gigantic highend cooler, but the head simply doesn't reach it and get's stuck earlier in the chain (die -> heatspreader -> cooler) On my old 3rd gen i5 I replace the paste with liquid metal, which gave me about 10-15°C less. But it's risky and you can break the thing while doing it.

Keep in mind that 70°C and even 80°C isn't anything dangerous. Sure, it's hot, hotter than many would be comfortable with, but not to the point where something breaks. The fact that it isn't throttling shows that the CPU itself thinks it's perfectly fine like that. I've seen laptops idling at that range. And both, the mentioned 3rd gen i5 and my old Core 2 rig for tinkering can and will run at those temperatures when overclocked.

People in the LTT thread you linked also say that VCCIN should be higher than the other voltages, and the OP there reduced that one. So keep that in mind.
In most cases simply reducing Vcore shouldn't cause any harm. Just as with overclocking you sort of change the ratio of voltage to clock, so it might become unstable, but that is something do be dialed in step by step anyway. You could take a look at any oc tutorial, but instead of increasing things, you decrease it, the same way to test stability applies.

I'm planning to use Throttlestop and every tutorial video I've seen doesn't touch the VCCIN part and only changes the 'offset voltage' bit. This video is included within the folder in which the Throttlestop came. I'm now not as hesitant but yeah I'd like to wait for more responses.

 

[uWebb429]

@GUMSHi

Intel set the thermal throttling temperature for your CPU and for most CPUs that they have produced to 100°C. Intel considers any temperature under that to be a safe operating temperature. If operating your CPU at 80°C was dangerous or was going to significantly shorten its life span, Intel would have set the thermal throttling temperature to 80°C instead of 100°C but they didn't.

The OEM Intel cooler allows the CPU to run hot. There is nothing to worry about as long as your CPU is not reaching 100°C while gaming.

Your CPU is almost 9 years old. It will likely run another 9 years without any issues no matter what temperature you run it at.

You can use ThrottleStop to undervolt your CPU but you really do not need to do this. Post some ThrottleStop screenshots that show your settings if you need help. With 4th Gen processors, setting the core and the cache to an offset of -50 mV is a good place to start stability testing.

 

[GUMSHi]

@GUMSHi

Intel set the thermal throttling temperature for your CPU and for most CPUs that they have produced to 100°C. Intel considers any temperature under that to be a safe operating temperature. If operating your CPU at 80°C was dangerous or was going to significantly shorten its life span, Intel would have set the thermal throttling temperature to 80°C instead of 100°C but they didn't.

The OEM Intel cooler allows the CPU to run hot. There is nothing to worry about as long as your CPU is not reaching 100°C while gaming.

Your CPU is almost 9 years old. It will likely run another 9 years without any issues no matter what temperature you run it at.

You can use ThrottleStop to undervolt your CPU but you really do not need to do this. Post some ThrottleStop screenshots that show your settings if you need help. With 4th Gen processors, setting the core and the cache to an offset of -50 mV is a good place to start stability testing.

Here's the screenshot, I only did 49.8 (for both core and cache) because I didn't want to do too much and risk any unstability. I already noticed some decent changes in temps (dropped up to 5 degrees in most games I play now) so I'm fairly satisfied already.

 

[uWebb429]

Here's the screenshot

Why did you crop the screenshot? The FIVR voltage monitoring table and turbo ratios are also important.

If your temps are down then I guess everything is OK.

 

[GUMSHi]

Why did you crop the screenshot? The FIVR voltage monitoring table and turbo ratios are also important.

If your temps are down then I guess everything is OK.

Because I didn't think those were relevant lol. My bad, here's the whole FIVR window. So far it's been good and I notice no crashes or freezing.

 

[uWebb429]

@GUMSHi

Did you lower your turbo ratios on purpose? ThrottleStop shows the default values for your CPU are 37 37 36 35. Either you or the BIOS has set these to 37 36 35 35. Not a huge difference but there is no reason to under clock your CPU.

 

[GUMSHi]

@GUMSHi

Did you lower your turbo ratios on purpose? ThrottleStop shows the default values for your CPU are 37 37 36 35. Either you or the BIOS has set these to 37 36 35 35. Not a huge difference but there is no reason to under clock your CPU.

No, I only touched the offset voltage slider on core and cache. I didn't change anything else.