Question Alpine 17 LP cooler on an i7-12700k - Is it working ?

Myrmidon1989

Honorable
Jun 1, 2017
27
0
10,530
Good day,

Long story short I was recently cleaning my case before installing a new GPU and very spectacularly hit the fan blade of my cpu cooler with the nozzle of the compu-cleaner. A fan blade snapped off. I booted my system up just to see if it was possible and my cores were running at 97-100c. I turned off pretty immediately. So I bought a new Alpine 17 LP cooler. It's basically an 'enhanced stock cooler' I wanted something of similar dimensions as I suck at changing parts however my system had been doing fine for 2+ years on a basic intel stock but this new cooler is giving me huge fluctuations on the desktop 29-62 I've seen and just resting on the menu screen of multiple games it's all cores in the 90's.

I'm wondering if I had this thing installed properly. I removed all old paste from my cpu with a proper thermal paste remover (arcticlean) and placed the cooler down. Now here's the thing, this Alpine cooler came with some pre-applied thermal paste, it looked like a big grey circle. I'd never seen that before so I put it down. Could my issue be this default pre-applied paste? It wasn't dried out or hard. Also when trying to put the 4 pins down and locked I'm not 100% sure they're all locked, there always seems to be 1 corner that has a little wobble and when I readjust it another corner gets a little give, I've tried individually and two at a time diagonally, looked behind motherboard and the pins do seem to be through and look like they're all equal distance through but I don't know.... The internet also seems to give conflicting info on where the arrows on the 4 clips should be facing....

I've installed a stock cooler before which is basically almost what this is and I remember it being pretty dummy proof so I'm not sure what's wrong here.
 

Nice Nicer

Commendable
May 24, 2021
103
3
1,595
The paste ist probably not the problem.It might be MX4 or MX5 by Arctic, which is pretty good. Those clips are so annoying. If three are in properly, the cooler ist already holding on to the Mainboard quite well. But there might still be a huge gap between the cooler and the CPU. You might have to check every corner of the CPU for good contact with a flashlight before turning on your PC.