Question Core i9 14900k Bluescreens and horrible temperatures.

[Alberto921]

CPU: i9 14900k
MB: Gigabyte Z790 AORUS ELITE X WIFI7 DDR5 Rev. 1.0
COOLER: be quiet! Dark Rock Elite

As the title suggest, horrific temperatures and 1 instance of blue screen specifically CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT.

The blue screen occurred before i got any info about how bad the default config in most motherboards is for these cpu's, at least before the BIOS updates, so i downloaded the latest bios updates which have intel specified settings as defaults, and hopefully any of this nonsense doesn't occur again, HOWEVER...

After doing some tests for temps, i discovered that they are unacceptable for me(everything is throttling, not even 10 seconds and 100c is reached...), the cooler is quite loud for me at this stage, it has 1 switch button with "P" and "E", i set it to "E" which i suppose means "ECO", so it should be quite but the performance would be lower.(The problem is it's already loud, and what happens if i set it to performance..)

Another thing is when i was placing the thermal paste, a bit too much spew in and spread around a bit, so i left it like that, not sure if it can cause some kinds of problems, i am also not sure if i screw in the cooler strong enough, so there's no "spacing" in between the CPU and cooler.

But the thing that bothers me the most is i got this CPU, with a cut off paper, the white paper that attached both sides of the box, which means that clearly someone opened the box, and the reason could be simply someone had this CPU before, and they returned it, because in my country you can return the item in 14 days without any reason...

I told them clearly that i want no damn open boxes as it never ends up well, tho i ordered multiple things, so maybe someone "forgot" about it, but in the last 15 years dealing with an open box, they had practically always either missing items, or were defective.

In any way, i already lost too much time building this PC, and i clearly have no time to deal with any of this BS since i need it mainly for my work.
Should i straight up return it or try some fixes?

I did the tests using the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility, the test was for 1 minute... Not even 20 seconds and already 100c is reached, and all 3 bars for throttling are red (Thermal, Power, Current/EDP), what i tried is go to the bios, and limit the max package TDP, whatever it is, normally it was reaching around 270W, so i set it to 180max, it reduced the temps to max 87c and average around 80c, but the max P core frequency was like 4.4GHZ or so...

Screenshot for the test, after i limited the package TDP to 180 max

 

[uWebb429]

@Alberto921

Your air cooler is not sufficient to cool a 14900K when it is running at full power. Even an AIO liquid cooler with a 360mm rad will struggle to cool a 14900K when you are running a full load stress test at max power.

You can either lower the power limits like you are doing or you can get a much better cooler. Even then, you might still have to lower the turbo power limits a little.

This excessive heat and power consumption is the reason why Intel just released a new line of CPUs. The new Arrow Lake line is not nearly as power hungry. Look for an Intel 285K and a different motherboard or consider switching to AMD if you can.