[SOLVED] CPU at 98c likely to cause damage? Just Prime95 things or something else?

Alteration42

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May 17, 2016
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Hello all,

I had Just ran Prime95 for about 20 minutes on a computer I built a month ago - temps maxing around 87c . Shortly after Prime95 finished the first tests without any errors and moved on to small FFTs my temps had rocketed to 98c! At which point I stopped the test.

My idle temps are around mid 30s to 50s (has a habit of jumping and falling by up to 10c every 20seconds for some reason). Under load it can reach 86c in Cinebench and stays around the low 70s high 60s during gaming.

My main question is would these moments at 98c be likely to of caused any damage to my CPU?
Secondly, is this indicative of a problem with my build, cooling or otherwise?
What should I do next to prevent any further ridiculous temperatures?

Unfortunately I don't have any logs from Prime95 as my knee jerk reaction was to start hyperventilating and uninstall the program.

I used HWiNFO64 for temp monitoring.

Specs:

CPU - Ryzen 5 3600 / 4.3ghz OC 1.3volts (according to HWiNFO64 only pulls around 1.26 volts under load)
Cooler - CoolerMaster Hyper 212
Mobo - MSI Mortar Max B450
RAM - DDR4 16GB 3600mhz XMP / timings adjusted using 1usmus calculator
PSU - EVGA 750 GQ
GPU - GTX 970
OS - Windows 10 Pro
BIOS and Chipset drivers up to date
All but GPU bought new 1 month ago.

P.S. I am somewhat of a novice and apologise in advance for any shortcomings in the information provided or general noobishness.

Thanks for reading.
 
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Solution
Ok, stop. The case is the problem, not the cooler, almost certainly. I've seen, I dunno, maybe twenty threads where no matter what cooler was used and no matter what we did, it would not cool correctly in that case.

I would HIGHLY recommend looking at a different CASE, long before you think about ordering a different cooler. You could have a D15 in there and it wouldn't make any difference, it would still have problems.

Take the side panel off the case and run it like that for a while. Look at your thermals and see what a huge difference it makes. Then get a different case. One of the worst cases ever made in terms of the modern era and having poor cooling.
Make sure you have the latest motherboard BIOS version installed.

Make sure you have the MOST recent chipset drivers (What chipset? You don't say. Just "mortar max". B450? B350? X470? Who knows) for your motherboard chipset installed. Use the ones from the AMD website.

After installing the latest chipset drivers, go into the control panel power options by typing "control" without the quotes in the start menu run box and hit enter. Then choose power options. Choose the AMD balanced plan. Then go into the advanced options for that power plan and make sure the minimum is set to somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-8% for the processor power management setting.

Save settings and then exit Windows. Go into the BIOS and set the following.

Enable Core CPPC. Enable CPPC preferred cores. Enable either Advanced C-states or Global C-states, whichever is present. It's the same thing, but named differently depending on board manufacturer.

Also, until you get a better cooler, I'd make sure PBO (Power boost overdrive) is disabled but leave the regular Precision boost (XFR2) profile enabled. You will not lose enough performance to matter and it will absolutely minimize the tendon stretching boost behavior that's likely due to PBO/PBO2 being set to Auto rather than disabled. Once you have a good, capable cooler, feel free to enable it again if you wish. And by "good, capable cooler" I mean something better than your 212 EVO.

Don't get me wrong, it's marginally better than the stock cooler, by probably not by that much. This is when spending fifty bucks on a cooler that actually offers significantly better than stock performance would be a good idea.
 
Thanks for your reply.

Apologies, I failed to mention it is a B450 board.
The BIOS and chipset drivers are all up to date. CPPC, CPPC Preferred Cores and Global C-State were enabled.
Could not find "Power Boost Overdrive" however Precision Boost Overdrive is off.
I have now changed minimum CPU usage in my powerplan to 8%.

My main concern was if my CPU being at 98c for a few moments would have done it any damage. Could you weigh in on that?
Also if Prime95 ripping my CPU temp that high in a matter of seconds is down to the cooler I have installed then I'll replace it for sure, can you suggest a particular cooler?

Thanks again!
 
Sorry, I meant to say Precision boost overdrive.

Also, make sure that Cool N Quiet is enabled in the BIOS as well.

Your system would throttle down before any permanent damage could happen, if it was only an intermittent thing, at least, it's supposed to, but you still don't want to do that. You want to REALLY remain below 80°C under a full Small FFT load. If you can't, then the overclock is too big, the cooling is not sufficient or there is a configuration issue with something.

I would check that your cooling profile for the CPU_FAN cooler in the BIOS is set to standard, and not silent, or else that you have a custom fan profile set for the CPU fan that directs the fan to be at 100% operation by the time it reaches 75°C, and about 50% operation at about 60°C, so that it quickly ramps up between 60-75 degrees. Below that, it's not that big a deal but I wouldn't set the PWM fan profile to less than about 33% at 35°C and allow it to gradually increase to 50% between 35-50 degrees so that it's at least tolerably quiet at lower loads.

One time of a temp that high, even multiple times for very short periods, isn't going to harm anything. Repeatedly reaching those temps, will, absolutely, begin causing electromigration at some point.
 
I'd say Darkbreeze answered a majority of your questions, but I must second the point of getting a better CPU cooler. Honestly I have the same CPU cooler on my i5-4670K that I OC'd to 4.3 maybe 1.125 volts and running Prime95 I never got above 77 Celsius. It wasn't stable at that voltage and I refused to crank it up so I ended up turning down the frequency after a few months to 4.0 eventually, just to stop fussing with it.

I also have i7-7700K that I have a water cooled CPU with a dual 120mm fan radiator and that was 4.8 ghz at 1.32 volts which hit a max of 89 celsius and an average of 77 on Prime95 and it seemed pretty stable. Though that was just for test purposes, I ended up turning off the OC or allowing my mobo bios to auto overclock or something. But I know what I game and run Prime95 on that it doesn't break 60 celsius.

So I think with a decent water cooling system you can get those temps considerably lower, but then again...if you're only reaching high 60's low 70's while gaming (depending on what games) that's not bad in my opinion. Unless your doing some rendering or video encoding or something that is heavily CPU intensive on a daily basis I don't know if I would worry about it. I feel like PC culture gets hung up on what my PC does under max load, but honestly how often are you putting that sort of strain on your PC when you aren't running benchmarks? If it's a gaming PC (depending on the games), I doubt you'll even really run you CPU through it's paces. Running the Witcher 3 on max settings on my i5 PC my GPU was under max strain reaching 90-100% usage, but my CPU never really got that high or that hot.

It always boils down to what you want your PC to do. My last new PC I built with an i7 and water cooling cause I wanted to see what it could do and I thought it would be cool and got the CPU at a steal and the water cooler for free, but I honestly haven't utilized those components.
 
You definitely don't need water for the Ryzen 3600. Any of these air coolers will handle it EASILY, with room to spare if you want to enable PBO or do a bit of overclocking.

Noctua NH-D14 (Replace stock fans with NF-A14 industrialPPC 2000rpm)
Noctua NH-D15/D15 SE-AM4
Noctua NH-D14 (With original fans)
Thermalright Silver arrow IB-E Extreme
Phanteks PH-TC14PE (BK,BL, OR or RD)
Cryorig R1 Ultimate or Universal
Thermalright Legrand Macho RT
Thermalright Macho X2
Deepcool Assassin III
Thermalright Macho rev. C
Thermalright Macho rev.B
Thermalright ARO-M14G (Ryzen only)
Thermalright Macho direct
Deepcool Assassin II
Be Quiet Dark rock Pro 4
Noctua NH-U14S
Thermalright true spirit 140 Direct
Noctua NH-U12A
 
I've opted to buy a Dark Rock 4. While its TDP is 50 watts less than the Pro 4 version at 200w TDP, if I'm right some of the other coolers you mentioned were also 200w TDP leaving me some extra money to get a couple extra case fans, also I'm not certain the Pro 4 will fit in my CM Q300L mATX case. If you think 200w TDP is not enough please say so, otherwise I'll assume this is ok.

I'm relieved to hear the brief moment of 98c is likely not to have caused any damage.

Thanks for both your replies, and best of luck to you
 
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You can't assume that what every manufacturer states as TDP is actually accurate. Some of them are known to be outright liars and others are simply misleadingly creative with their specifications. Be Quiet is one of them. I believe the specifications listed by Noctua, Thermalright (NOT to be confused with Thermaltake), Cryorig and Phanteks are a lot more accurate than most these other companies. TDP is highly misleading itself, because of the way that CPU manufacturers list them as well. AMD for example lists their TDP as the amount of thermal design power with the CPU at it's FULL default boosted profile while Intel lists TDP as the thermal design power with the CPU at it's unboosted base clocks.

My list of coolers is based on many factors, and here is the full list and my usual copy pasta. The dark rock 4 is nowhere near the performance of these other coolers but it should be ok for your Ryzen 3600.

Below is my list of preferred CPU AIR coolers, also known as Heatsink fans (HSF).

Do not look here for recommendations on water/liquid cooling solutions. There are none to be found.

A good air cooler works just as well for most applications. There are very few instances I can think of where an AIO will work better than a good air cooler, and even fewer where an AIO will outperform an air cooler if you are willing to buy the right air cooler and then level up by adding some even higher end fans to it.

Loops leak. Heatsinks don't. Pumps fail, FAR more often and usually with far worse consequences, than fans do.

And unlike a heatsink fan assembly, when your pump fails for 99% of AIO coolers, you will be replacing the whole thing, for another 100+ dollars, rather than just a 25 dollar investment for the failure of a fan. Especially since I've rarely seen dual fan coolers have both fans fail at the same time, but even if you factor in two fan failures that's still only about fifty bucks compared to the 100+ it will cost to replace an AIO with a failed pump. And you WILL have a failed pump on most AIO coolers within three years of purchase. Seeing one last longer than five years is possible, but it is not particularly common and we often, very often, see them fail at around the 3 year mark. Sometimes much sooner.

Pump quality and longevity is an area that needs GREAT improvement before AIO coolers will become a primary recommendation for me.

I see a lot of AIO coolers leak and damage hardware as well.

Certainly there are situations where an AIO is called for, or even preferred, but those are MOSTLY aesthetic considerations, because let's face it, a build with an AIO or custom loop generally "looks" a lot cleaner than one that has a big heatsink taking up half the real estate inside your case. When that is the case, I have recommendations for those as well, but I don't offer them unless somebody is specifically asking to go that route.[/B]

They are basically listed in order of preference, from top to bottom. To some degree that preference is based on known performance on similarly overclocked configurations, but not entirely. There are likely a couple of units that are placed closer to the top not because they offer purely better performance than another cooler which is below it, but potentially due to a variety of reasons.

One model might be placed higher than another with the same or similar performance, but has quieter or higher quality fans. It may have the same performance but a better warranty. Long term quality may be higher. It may be less expensive in some cases. Maybe it performs slightly worse, but has quieter fans and a better "fan pitch". Some fans with equal decibel levels do not "sound" like they are the same as the specific pitch heard from one fan might be less annoying than another.

In any case, these are not "tiered" and are not a 100% be all, end all ranking. They are simply MY preference when looking at coolers for a build or when making recommendations. Often, which HSF gets chosen depends on what is on this list and fits the budget or is priced right at the time due to a sale or rebate. Hopefully it will help you and you can rest assured that every cooler listed here is a model that to some degree or other is generally a quality unit which is a lot more likely to be worth the money spent on it than on many other models out there that might look to be a similarly worthwhile investment.

Certainly there are a great many other very good coolers out there, but these are models which are usually available to most anybody building a system or looking for a cooler, regardless of what part of the world they might live in. As always, professional reviews are usually an absolutely essential part of the process of finding a cooler so if you are looking at a model not listed here, I would highly recommend looking at at least two or three professional reviews first.

If you cannot find two reviews of any given cooler, it is likely either too new to have been reviewed yet or it sucked, and nobody wanted to buy one in order to review it plus the manufacturer refused to send samples out to the sites that perform reviews because they knew it would likely get bad publicity.

IMO, nobody out there is making better fans, overall, than Noctua, followed pretty closely by Thermalright. So if you intend to match case fans to the same brand on your HSF, those are pretty hard to beat. Of course, Corsair has it's Maglev fans, and those are pretty damn good too, but they tend to be more expensive than what are in my opinion better fans by these other two, so while they are good products they don't have the same noise characteristics and are probably better suited for configurations where sheer brute force is preferred over low noise that still gives good performance. Also, as with most fan models out there, don't look at the specifications for the non-RGB Maglev fan models and think that you'll be getting the same specs on any RGB versions, because you won't. Fans with RGB tend to sacrifice both maximum CFM and static pressure for the right to stuff the RGB electronics under the hood.


Noctua NH-D14 (Replace stock fans with NF-A14 industrialPPC 2000rpm)
Noctua NH-D15/D15 SE-AM4
Noctua NH-D14 (With original fans)
Thermalright Silver arrow IB-E Extreme
Phanteks PH-TC14PE (BK,BL, OR or RD)
Cryorig R1 Ultimate or Universal
Thermalright Legrand Macho RT
Thermalright Macho X2
Deepcool Assassin III
Thermalright Macho rev. C
Thermalright Macho rev.B
Thermalright ARO-M14G (Ryzen only)
Thermalright Macho direct
Deepcool Assassin II
Be Quiet Dark rock Pro 4
Noctua NH-U14S
Thermalright true spirit 140 Direct
FSP Windale 6
Scythe Ninja 5
Scythe Mugen max
Scythe Mugen 5 rev.B
BeQuiet dark rock (3 or 4)
- Your selection
Thermalright Macho SBM
Cryorig H5
Noctua NH-U12S
Arctic freezer 34 eSports Duo
Phanteks PH-TC14S
Phanteks PH-TC12DX (Any)
Cryorig H7
Deepcool Gammaxx 400
Cooler Master Hyper 212 (EVO, X, RGB. I'd only recommend this cooler if no other good aftermarket models are available to you.)



It may not be obvious, but is probably worth mentioning, that not all cooler models will fit all CPU sockets as aftermarket coolers generally require an adapter intended for use with that socket. Some coolers that fit an AMD platform might not fit a later AMD platform, or an Intel platform. Often these coolers come with adapters for multiple types of platforms but be sure to verify that a specific cooler WILL work with your platform before purchasing one and finding out later that it will not.
 
Ah just when I thought it was all figured out ;p

The issue here is the clearance in my CM Q300L case, I think the largest i can go is 160mm tall. Otherwise the Scythe Ninja 5 would have been perfect.

What are your thoughts on the Scythe Fuma 2? This would be perfect as I can purchase it within budget and the dimensions are fine.
 
Ok, stop. The case is the problem, not the cooler, almost certainly. I've seen, I dunno, maybe twenty threads where no matter what cooler was used and no matter what we did, it would not cool correctly in that case.

I would HIGHLY recommend looking at a different CASE, long before you think about ordering a different cooler. You could have a D15 in there and it wouldn't make any difference, it would still have problems.

Take the side panel off the case and run it like that for a while. Look at your thermals and see what a huge difference it makes. Then get a different case. One of the worst cases ever made in terms of the modern era and having poor cooling.
 
Solution
I took the side panel off and it seems to have dropped maximum load temps during Cinebench by about 5c.

I think it's important to note at this point that I only have 1 front intake fan and 1 exhaust at the back - according to LTT the best case scenario is having 2 front intake 1 rear exhaust and 1 top rear exhaust. I've already ordered 2 fans so I should try that first surely?

If I have to throw this case out I'm getting close to not being able to afford this venture.

It's probably also worth reiterating that under normal use during gaming (which is the most cpu intensive thing this rig would realistically be put under) I only reach mid 70's
 
The best cooling configuration for ANY standard ATX or micro ATX tower case, is a rear and top-rear exhaust, and then however many front intake fans it will accomodate. That's no revelation by LTT, or anybody else, since it's been known for years and years and is pretty well common knowledge for anybody with even a modicum of cooling knowledge.

And yes, you COULD mod the case for better airflow, if you have the tools and are so inclined. I wouldn't recommend doing it like that though. I'd simply get a piece of mod mesh, cut the entire front panel out and replace it with the mod mesh. Obviously, up to you.

To be honest, it's probably cheaper, and better, to simply get a case that doesn't have those problems, like the Focus G. Might actually be less expensive in the long run. Of course, if you have the tools, are pretty handy and know what you are doing you can likely get a good result with a modification but it's hopefully one that doesn't look like crap like what Steve did there. In fairness, that was not intended as a "do this to fix airflow problems" solution. It was done to show that Cooler Master, again, doesn't know how to design a case and needs to start paying attention to the fact that you can't pull air in through pinholes.

And, I think it could be fixed to be a lot better, without looking like that ended up looking, by simply taking a bit more time with it. It's probably all a moot point though if you don't also add another front intake and a top rear exhaust because your CPU cooler can only work as well as the amount of ambient air it has to work with. If need be, I'd simply leave the side panel off permanently until a better solution, whatever that looks like, can be approached.
 
As per your PM to me, compared to the Dark Rock 4, the Scythe Fuma 2 is an exceptional cooler, however, it's huge. It's a dual finstack cooler just like the Noctua NH-D14/15 or Thermalright Silver arrow iBe extreme, and many others. What it doesn't have that those have is dual 140mm fans. The Fuma 2 has only 120mm fans.

Compared to what you have now, this is an outstanding choice, however, while it WILL support that cooler's height and any cooler up to 165mm tall, it will take up a lot of room so be sure to look at some professional reviews of that cooler FIRST, before you buy the Fuma 2. It's big, and for me if I'm going to buy a twin finstack cooler and practically fill half my case with CPU cooler, it had better be a slightly larger model with 140mm fans, since all that space is already lost anyhow there is no reason to suffer a loss of cooling performance that could be had by doing so. As a caveat though, if the price of that cooler is less than some of the other coolers on my list, I'd be pretty skeptical. It's highly unusual and highly unlikely that the Fuma 2 would be less expensive than something like Macho rev.B or C, and to be honest, while I'm not particularly a giant fan of Be Quiet in general, the Dark rock PRO 4 has pretty good performance and is good quality.

It does however have non-standard sized 135mm fan on it so if you ever have to replace that fan you will likely need to know that a 140mm fan will be a little larger and might require a different way of attaching it to the heatsink, or get your replacement from Be Quiet, which I wouldn't do. A black Noctua NH-A14 PWM chromax model is much better fan if it ever comes to that.