[SOLVED] CPU suddenly overheating to 100C°

[nss.maes]

Had some issues with overheating maybe 5 months ago, applied new arctic silver thermal paste. Thanks to intel heatsink janky lock mechanism everything worked fine albeit on the hotter side of things, around 60C°. Today, nothing special, browsing the internet, then launched a game that I had launched plenty of times of the last 2 weeks just fine, but shortly afterwards the pc started going a lot slower and then just bluescreened. Launched again after letting it cool down for 30 min, went into bios and it had risen to 100C° in however long it took to get to the bios.
After a little bit of searching online I re-applied thermal paste, made sure those godforsaken intel lock pins were tight, even laid my pc on its side so gravity helped push the heatsink against the cpu and it actually did get about 3 degrees cooler, allowing me to launch speccy and look at some stats instead of it bluescreening as soon as I got to the desktop. With all this I think we can rule out the heatsink as the culprit, especially after working fine for so long. Fan is working fine aswell, bios says it's going at about 2000rpm. I don't know anything about overclocking, but I didn't change any settings at all, I do however always have that OCGenie on.

What could be making the cpu run so hot if it's not the heatsink, the fan nor the thermal paste?
It started happening when I launched that game, could it have anything to do with that? It's a pretty cpu intensive game, but it worked fine up until today.

z87 mpower max mobo
intel i7-4770
8gigs of ram

 

[COLGeek]

Get a better heatsink. The OEM Intel version is a pain and in my opinion not reliable due to its push-pin design.

 

[nss.maes]

Get a better heatsink. The OEM Intel version is a pain and in my opinion not reliable due to its push-pin design.

Yeah, I've been thinking about that since I reapplied that thermal paste 5 months ago, I will soon.
That doesn't explain how it suddenly shot up though, and how it stays 100 degrees even when I make sure there's a proper connection between the heatsink and the cpu.

 

[Satan-IR]

The suddenness of it is another indication of what COLGeek said.

The plastic pins which are under tension to keep the heatsink tightly stuck to the top of CPU get loose with heat and one or more of them dislodge a bit and heatsink is not firmly sitting on the CPU and this decreases it's heat conductivity.

Also things could happens during reapplying of the thermal paste such as too much paste which reduces conductivity and also air trapped in the paste and a flattened bubble between the CPU and heatsink preventing some area of both from touching.

Anyway I'd also suggest getting a better 3rd party heatsink/cooler.

 

[nss.maes]

You guys were right, I checked to see if the heatsink was locked in tight and I swear it didn't budge when I touched it, but when I physically push the heatsink onto the cpu the temperature goes down to 40C° silly me. Time to shill out and get a new heatsink.