AMD FX9590 running waaay too hot. Running 20 degrees hotter than usual at idle for no apparent reason.

[Gundalfthegreat]

I have an amd fx9590, with a full open loop cooling system. I have a 280x140 45mm thick full copper radiator, 2 decnt push fans and on 140x37.5 thick high power pull fan (only had room for one on the back for the rad). It's got pure distilled water in and a bit of biocide in to stop it getting gunged up. And it has a 16 watt 800lph water pump with a 4m pressure head. So all the kit is good and i've just completely dissassembled the whole loop, taken apart and thoroughly cleaned everything including the pump internals. So it's all like new. It used to keep the idle temps really low, between 28 and 34 degrees Celsius. But for the last couple of months I've noticed the idle temps jumped up massively.. So my first thought was maybe the water block is clogged, so i took it all apart, cleaned it all and put it all back together. It's dropped the temps by about 8 degrees but it's till idling at about 55 degrees which is waay too high. Used to be a lot lower. It's not that the heat is being dissipated, there's a lot of heat coming from the radiator so the heat is being taken away from the cpu it just seems to be running stupidly hot. The fans are all set up correctly, the pump is wired directly to the power supply so is always on full. There's no reason why it should be running this hot. I've also checked task manger to see if there's any background apps causing the cpu to work harder, and accorfing to speedfan the cpu is only being used 1-2% so it doesn't seem like there's a dodgy program making it overheat. And of course when i try and play any games the fans spin up and make a huge amount of noise moving tonnes f air and the computer heats up my room like a furnace. I've no idea what could be causing it.

 

[CooLWoLF]

Well you really have underclocked a considerable amount down to 4GHz and a Vcore of 1.16V.
Your temps are maxing out at 52C so you can bring it back up.

Your BCLK ratio is 200 so set your multiplier at 22.5 for 4.5GHz and Vcore at 1.260V - 1.35 and test that.
Which stress tester are you using.? Hope it's not P95.

HWInfo is not either reading or showing your 12v or your 5v Rails. Try HWMonitor to see if that will read your voltages during the stress test. Just don't have two monitoring systems open at the same time.

Curious why you said "Hope it's not P95." Wasn't that like the holy grail of stability testing at one point?

 

[Gundalfthegreat]

Well you really have underclocked a considerable amount down to 4GHz and a Vcore of 1.16V.
Your temps are maxing out at 52C so you can bring it back up.

Your BCLK ratio is 200 so set your multiplier at 22.5 for 4.5GHz and Vcore at 1.260V - 1.35 and test that.
Which stress tester are you using.? Hope it's not P95.

HWInfo is not either reading or showing your 12v or your 5v Rails. Try HWMonitor to see if that will read your voltages during the stress test. Just don't have two monitoring systems open at the same time.

Yeah I was using P95 🙁. I thought that was a good one, what's wrong with it? And the vcore is actually set to 1.2 in the bios but it always shows lower on whatever monitoring software i use when the computer is actually on windows. I'm not sure why it does that. I had also put the NB voltage down but found this made it unstable so i've put it back up to 1.1250v which is the default setting.

Which stress test do you recommend instead of P95? And also the voltage set at 1.2 int he bios, is the absolute lowest i could set it for it to run stable at 4.0Ghz. I'll try what you said anyway and see how it goes. Also what does the BCLK ratio do? And what does the multiplier do?

 

[MeanMachine41]

P95 is a harsh tester and will push your CPU to the MAX without telling you why the workers have stopped due to instability and the algorithm intensifies on each pass. It should never be used un-monitored and I only ever used it for an initial 10min test on small FFT. It's like putting your foot flat to the boards and leaving it there, Why would you want to do that.? IMO it should be left to factory technicians for destructive testing.

AIDA64 is the way to go as it will provide all the info you need to determine temperatures and Voltages under load. It will also test your sub systems ie, Memory, Disk and GPU.
AIDA64 is free trial software for a month and that's plenty of time to test your system.

Download the self installing .exe file from here: https://www.aida64.com/downloads
Put it on your desktop along side HWinfo monitor. Go to the TOOLS menu in AIDA64 and check the boxes for CPU, FPU and cache initially. Run the test for 10mins and take screen shots at the 10 min mark.
You can run tests for your sub systems later if you wish.

This way you can submit your screen shots for analysis to get an accurate assessment of your system.
You can use IMIGUR for this purpose. Just upload the files to IMIGUR and obtain the BBurl as a link here.

Your CPU has a base clock frequency (BCLK) of 200MHz and that times the Multiplier gives you your target frequency. ie, 200 x 22 = 4.4GHz and 200 x 23 = 4.6GHz etc. The FX-9590 has a default frequency set to 4.7GHz = 200 x 23.5.
For simple overclocking, just keep it simple. No NB changes and no Base clock changes. Just the multiplier.

Overclocking methodology is to choose your target frequency (you start with your default frequency to establish a base line for OCing) with a Core voltage to attain stability then stress test. If stable then increase target frequency in 100MHz steps and again up your Vcore in .010 steps till stable. Rinse and repeat with stress testing till you reach what is known as the WALL. That is your MAX OC for your CPU and no matter what you do you cant climb over it nor go around it. All this also depends on your Cooling capacity. All CPUs are different and your purchase and OC ability is dependent on the Silicone Lottery.

 

[Gundalfthegreat]

P95 is a harsh tester and will push your CPU to the MAX without telling you why the workers have stopped due to instability and the algorithm intensifies on each pass. It should never be used un-monitored and I only ever used it for an initial 10min test on small FFT. It's like putting your foot flat to the boards and leaving it there, Why would you want to do that.? IMO it should be left to factory technicians for destructive testing.

AIDA64 is the way to go as it will provide all the info you need to determine temperatures and Voltages under load. It will also test your sub systems ie, Memory, Disk and GPU.
AIDA64 is free trial software for a month and that's plenty of time to test your system.

Download the self installing .exe file from here: https://www.aida64.com/downloads
Put it on your desktop along side HWinfo monitor. Go to the TOOLS menu in AIDA64 and check the boxes for CPU, FPU and cache initially. Run the test for 10mins and take screen shots at the 10 min mark.
You can run tests for your sub systems later if you wish.

This way you can submit your screen shots for analysis to get an accurate assessment of your system.
You can use IMIGUR for this purpose. Just upload the files to IMIGUR and obtain the BBurl as a link here.

Your CPU has a base clock frequency (BCLK) of 200MHz and that times the Multiplier gives you your target frequency. ie, 200 x 22 = 4.4GHz and 200 x 23 = 4.6GHz etc. The FX-9590 has a default frequency set to 4.7GHz = 200 x 23.5.
For simple overclocking, just keep it simple. No NB changes and no Base clock changes. Just the multiplier.

Overclocking methodology is to choose your target frequency (you start with your default frequency to establish a base line for OCing) with a Core voltage to attain stability then stress test. If stable then increase target frequency in 100MHz steps and again up your Vcore in .010 steps till stable. Rinse and repeat with stress testing till you reach what is known as the WALL. That is your MAX OC for your CPU and no matter what you do you cant climb over it nor go around it. All this also depends on your Cooling capacity. All CPUs are different and your purchase and OC ability is dependent on the Silicone Lottery.

Ah right I see. Thank you for all the information and clearing that up for me! And yes i think it's best to keep things as simple as possible here haha.

Okay. I set the cpu speed at 4.5Ghz, and after some time testing different voltages, I found the lowest stable voltage I could set in the BIOS was 1.3250v. I've been using it for 2 days-ish with these settings and haven't had any problems. I was very surprised to see that the idle temps only rose by about 2-4 degrees, then again the ambient temps have been quite a bit cooler than they was when it was set at 4Ghz and 1.2v but i still think this is pretty good considering.

I've just done a stress test using the stress tester you recommended. The max temps are waaaaay cooler using this stress test even though all the cpu cores were at 100% usage.

The Idle temp is at about 40 degrees now. I still think that's hot with the water cooling system I have but It's definitely much better than before. Here's a screenshot of the stress test info with hwinfo along side.

http://imgur.com/bIpyZTL

I might try and put it back up to 4.7 just to see what the temps are like but i don't want it to idle above 42 degrees because I don't want it warming my room up too much again ha.

 

[MeanMachine41]

OK now that's the kind of result I like to see Gundalfthegreat

Your voltages and temps are good at 4.5GHz and still some headroom. Save a profile in Bios that you can go back to in case things go belly up at a higher frequency. I have different profiles for both Summer and Winter as Ambient temps here can get to 40C, so I can't then use my 5.2GHz profile and bring mine back to 4.8GHz. Ideal temps are 10-15C above ambient room temperature and 60-65C under load.

You will never get the kind of temperatures during normal operations that you get using AIDA64 under load.
It's good to see your making headway.

 

[Gundalfthegreat]

OK now that's the kind of result I like to see Gundalfthegreat

Your voltages and temps are good at 4.5GHz and still some headroom. Save a profile in Bios that you can go back to in case things go belly up at a higher frequency. I have different profiles for both Summer and Winter as Ambient temps here can get to 40C, so I can't then use my 5.2GHz profile and bring mine back to 4.8GHz. Ideal temps are 10-15C above ambient room temperature and 60-65C under load.

You will never get the kind of temperatures during normal operations that you get using AIDA64 under load.
It's good to see your making headway.

Yeah I was thinking i might be able to push a little further now i know how to alter the voltages and core frequency without making a
pigs ear of it. The ambient temps are much much better than before. I think I've been a bit unlucky int he silicone lottery as this processor does seem to be particularly hot, even for a 9590. The first two closed loop cooling systems i tried (a 240 and 280mm rad with push pull fans) weren't enough to stop them temps from spiking, it would often blue screen or freeze during gaming. Or, it could be the mobo or psu, or a combination of all three. It is running stable and relatively cool now though so I'm happy. And I can see the difference in P95 and AIDA64, P95 makes the temps stupidly high and fluctuates erratically. Definitely not good for a highly strung 9590. I won't be using p95 again.

And yes I'm going to save this and use it as my summer profile i think and i'll try and make another that's a little higher for winter. If there's one advantage to having a 9590 it's that you can leave your window open in winter get fresh air in and the room will still be warm ha.

Thanks for all the help! I really appreciate you taking your time to reply and help me out with stabilizing this monster of a processor! I've learned a huge amount from it.

Thanks man!

 

[MeanMachine41]

Your Welcome Gundalfthegreat and glad you have it sorted.