[SOLVED] Nothing Can Keep my Overclocked i7 9700K Cool

Panzerbjorne39

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I’ve gone through three coolers for my overclocked 9700k. Looks like no off the shelf coolers either air or water can keep it under 90. I tried two air and one aio. One four heat pipes single tower air cooler, one six pipes twin tower, and lastly a 360mm AIO cooler. The 140mm fan options will not fit in my case and do not outperform my 360 AIO so that’s not it.
I’m leaving brands out of this because I want to avoid “try the brand I like” or “that brand sux” response which aren’t helpful. All three of the coolers were good, proven coolers in the price and performance brackets.
I’m using an 5.1 All core overclock on a ASUS Z-390 Prime using dynamic Vcore that maxes out 1.38. I’ve tried stepping down to 5.0 and it made almost no difference. Maybe 1-2 degrees at best, but still Over the acceptable thresholds. I’ve also ruled out the paste. I’ve tried three different pastes that are good quality.
Any bright ideas or suggestions?
 
Solution
@Panzerbjorne39
For your information, here's Silicon Lottery's binning statistics for 9700K:
Coffee Lake RefreshSSE FrequencyAVX2 FrequencyVcore% Capable
9700K4.90GHz4.70GHz1.337V100%
9700K5.00GHz4.80GHz1.350VTop 90%
9700K5.10GHz4.90GHz1.362VTop 38%
9700K5.20GHz5.00GHz1.375VTop 9%
9700K5.30GHz5.10GHz1.387VTop 1%

You don't appear to be using an AVX offset either. That would be making this harder to deal...

Panzerbjorne39

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Case cooling: under air there were two 140mm intake and two 120mm exhaust. Under current AIO configuration, the rad is front mounted in pull setup with two 120mm exhaust. Case is Corsair 220t airflow with mesh front.
 

gameoverman2016

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Hi, I have the same cpu as you and my h100i gtx failed to keep it cool at stock turbo,

I just bought a CM H500 case and a Corsair H115i RGB Pro XT AIO. Its still on the way, but I can update you once I get it, however I dont intend to OC on my current board, but Illbe happy to post how it does under stock turbo if you want
 

Panzerbjorne39

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Jan 14, 2020
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Hi, I have the same cpu as you and my h100i gtx failed to keep it cool at stock turbo,

I just bought a CM H500 case and a Corsair H115i RGB Pro XT AIO. Its still on the way, but I can update you once I get it, however I dont intend to OC on my current board, but Illbe happy to post how it does under stock turbo if you want
Thanks for the offer, but my goal is to maintain the highest overclock I can and keep it cool enough as to not degrade the silicon so that info won’t likely resolve my issue.
 
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Also, is your radiator getting hot? Feel it and see if the area near the inlet/outlet is getting hot. If it is then get new fans. If it isn't, then you're having an issue with your block/cpu contact or the pump is problematic. I know the all in one's aren't as good as custom loops, but as far as I am aware, you can get a better high static pressure fan and swap them if the radiator just isn't cooling fast enough. I recommend noctuas offerings. You can also try liquid metal on your waterblock if it's nickel plated to increase thermal movement from ihs to block. Don't use it on aluminum.
 

Panzerbjorne39

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9700k @ 5.1 dynamic vcore 1.37-1.4 LLC on auto, xmp II enabled
Asus z-390 Prime -A
Gigabyte RTX 2070 Super Gaming 3x OC
Corsair RM750x PSU
Crucial Ballistix Ram 2x 8Gb 3600Mhz
Grizzly Kryonaut paste
Enermax Liqtech II 360 AIO with swapped using Arctic P12 pressure optimized fans front mounted in pull Configuration
2x Arctic 120mm exhaust fans one top rear, one rear
UEFI settings
Asus multi core enhancement Disabled
XMP II
Sync All cores
Set to 51
CPU core cache limit to 255.5
CPU core set to Auto
LLC set to auto
Custom fan curve with fans and aio pump set to 100% at 75
 
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Found a review on the unit in question. Running AIDA64 FPU test, he got 72C running @ max speed with stock thermal paste and fans @ 25c ambient with a 1.35V 5ghz OC.

Your voltages are higher than his, and your Arctic p12 fans have half the cfm at 100% as the stock fans do. 102 stock vs 56. Now that's not counting cfm @ pressure on your rad, I'm just looking at specs in a side by side comparison. Your rad is plenty, your fans are good considering you are just running the cpu. I really want to know how hot the liquid inside is getting, to know if it's simply that the loop can't cool it adequately, or the thermal dissipation is pretty subpar on that waterblock.
I'm going to say #2 and to try Grizzly Conductonaut. The better the thermal coefficient is, as long as your system has the juice to dissipate the heat, the better. Or your chip just runs hot. :ROFLMAO:
 

Panzerbjorne39

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Jan 14, 2020
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Found a review on the unit in question. Running AIDA64 FPU test, he got 72C running @ max speed with stock thermal paste and fans @ 25c ambient with a 1.35V 5ghz OC.

Your voltages are higher than his, and your Arctic p12 fans have half the cfm at 100% as the stock fans do. 102 stock vs 56. Now that's not counting cfm @ pressure on your rad, I'm just looking at specs in a side by side comparison. Your rad is plenty, your fans are good considering you are just running the cpu. I really want to know how hot the liquid inside is getting, to know if it's simply that the loop can't cool it adequately, or the thermal dissipation is pretty subpar on that waterblock.
I'm going to say #2 and to try Grizzly Conductonaut. The better the thermal coefficient is, as long as your system has the juice to dissipate the heat, the better. Or your chip just runs hot. :ROFLMAO:
I think this chip runs hot for sure. I didn’t consider the CFM of the fans compared to stock. Could that be the issue?
 

floored63

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Feb 24, 2020
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I’ve gone through three coolers for my overclocked 9700k. Looks like no off the shelf coolers either air or water can keep it under 90. I tried two air and one aio. One four heat pipes single tower air cooler, one six pipes twin tower, and lastly a 360mm AIO cooler. The 140mm fan options will not fit in my case and do not outperform my 360 AIO so that’s not it.
I’m leaving brands out of this because I want to avoid “try the brand I like” or “that brand sux” response which aren’t helpful. All three of the coolers were good, proven coolers in the price and performance brackets.
I’m using an 5.1 All core overclock on a ASUS Z-390 Prime using dynamic Vcore that maxes out 1.38. I’ve tried stepping down to 5.0 and it made almost no difference. Maybe 1-2 degrees at best, but still Over the acceptable thresholds. I’ve also ruled out the paste. I’ve tried three different pastes that are good quality.
Any bright ideas or suggestions?

there's a new kind of air cooler thats suppost to come out this month toms did a short review on the prototype the production model is about to be released at the end of may its mainly marketed for highend ryzen chips but it'll fit intel sockets.
linus has a video testing this cooler with an amd cpu pulling 350watts and its staying at 70c.
im thinking about trying this for my 9700k.
 
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Phaaze88

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@Panzerbjorne39
For your information, here's Silicon Lottery's binning statistics for 9700K:
Coffee Lake RefreshSSE FrequencyAVX2 FrequencyVcore% Capable
9700K4.90GHz4.70GHz1.337V100%
9700K5.00GHz4.80GHz1.350VTop 90%
9700K5.10GHz4.90GHz1.362VTop 38%
9700K5.20GHz5.00GHz1.375VTop 9%
9700K5.30GHz5.10GHz1.387VTop 1%

You don't appear to be using an AVX offset either. That would be making this harder to deal with.
At the same frequency as the legacy instruction set, AVX is faster, but it requires more voltage, draws more power, and thus produces more heat than the former.
 
Solution
I think this chip runs hot for sure. I didn’t consider the CFM of the fans compared to stock. Could that be the issue?

You need to check the temp of the rad to find out if your fans are cutting it.

From what I've gathered is your voltage is very high compared to the majority of others who've overclocked. Try backing off voltage and overclock and monitor temps.. Not every CPU can overclock well.

Exactly what I was thinking, reminding me of my 2600k and chasing 5GHZ on it. No matter what I did, my specific chip just couldn't hit it. I think I managed 4.7 and ended up backing off to 4.4 for long term use. Only difference I noticed was synthetic benchmarks.
 

Phaaze88

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You need to check the temp of the rad to find out if your fans are cutting it.
Going by the specs, the OP did trade the stock fans for worse ones: https://www.enermaxeu.com/products/cpu-cooling/liquid-cooling/liqtech-ii/
T.B.Pressure PWM:
Fan rpm: 2300
Fan airflow: 102.17CFM
Static pressure: 6.28mmH2O

Arctic P12:
Fan rpm: 1800
Fan airflow: 56.3CFM
Static pressure: 2.2mmH2O

The engineers have already selected the best fans among their products for a particular cooler. When a user goes and changes that, they're going against the 'math' that's already been done...
Results will more or less be worse than the original.

Going by the fans' specs, the enermax AIO is a performance-oriented unit with high FPI(fins per inch). High FPI radiators need higher static pressure fans to cut through the... erm, thickness.
For the silence-focused units, the fans have lower rpm and the radiator FPI isn't as thick, thus it's easier to move air though.

@Panzerbjorne39
If you wanted to maintain a certain degree of noise, then a model with low rpm fans would've been the way to go.
 

Karadjgne

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LLC on auto is hurting. Should be manually set to medium (@ 55-65 depending on the bios ranges)

There's multiple voltages associated with cpus, there's VID, vcore, sa agent, ring, vccio etc all of which can add or lower temps. Leaving all of them set on auto and jacking up vcore to maintain stability is a recipe for disastrous temps.

Auto is Not Optimised, it generally over volts by a good margin, adding unnecessary voltage and current, and resultant temps.

If you want a cooler running cpu, that's stable and viable at a higher OC, you are going to have to get an education. Your cooler choice with a 360mm isn't to blame for the temps, it's the bios settings.

And you didn't say (or I missed reading) exactly what torture test you ran to get those temps. You should be using Prime95 small fft with all 3 AVX technologies disabled. If they aren't, or you use Aida64 or OCCT or Intel Burn, they Do use AVX tech and linpack which will give artificial results in the neighborhood of 130% ±

I'd strongly suggest you spend a great deal of time over at Asus ROG forums, doesn't matter exactly what brand your mobo is, it's got a 9700k and that's what's OC. The OC theory is identical, even if one mobo is vcore and another cpu voltage, same thing different name.
 
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Panzerbjorne39

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LLC on auto is hurting. Should be manually set to medium (@ 55-65 depending on the bios ranges)

There's multiple voltages associated with cpus, there's VID, vcore, sa agent, ring, vccio etc all of which can add or lower temps. Leaving all of them set on auto and jacking up vcore to maintain stability is a recipe for disastrous temps.

Auto is Not Optimised, it generally over volts by a good margin, adding unnecessary voltage and current, and resultant temps.

If you want a cooler running cpu, that's stable and viable at a higher OC, you are going to have to get an education. Your cooler choice with a 360mm isn't to blame for the temps, it's the bios settings.

And you didn't say (or I missed reading) exactly what torture test you ran to get those temps. You should be using Prime95 small fft with all 3 AVX technologies disabled. If they aren't, or you use Aida64 or OCCT or Intel Burn, they Do use AVX tech and linpack which will give artificial results in the neighborhood of 130% ±

I'd strongly suggest you spend a great deal of time over at Asus ROG forums, doesn't matter exactly what brand your mobo is, it's got a 9700k and that's what's OC. The OC theory is identical, even if one mobo is vcore and another cpu voltage, same thing different name.
I don’t like your post it’s honestly not helpful at all. I did educate myself. The overclock UEFI settings I used were based on the new egg video done by JJ at Asus on overclocking 9th gen Intel. I followed his instructions and did the best I could. I’ve also spent hours googling settings. JJ recommendations are the opposite of the meta everyone uses and it made sense to me.
He said auto vcore is more efficient and that he doesn’t use LLC setting and leaves it on auto. I’ve played with LLC settings and it hasn’t done anything with temps. Effectively telling me to go read on other forums isn’t helping. That’s why I’m here. If you have specific instructions you can assist me with to resolve my heat issue let’s hear it.
 
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Panzerbjorne39

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Jan 14, 2020
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Going by the specs, the OP did trade the stock fans for worse ones: https://www.enermaxeu.com/products/cpu-cooling/liquid-cooling/liqtech-ii/
T.B.Pressure PWM:
Fan rpm: 2300
Fan airflow: 102.17CFM
Static pressure: 6.28mmH2O

Arctic P12:
Fan rpm: 1800
Fan airflow: 56.3CFM
Static pressure: 2.2mmH2O

The engineers have already selected the best fans among their products for a particular cooler. When a user goes and changes that, they're going against the 'math' that's already been done...
Results will more or less be worse than the original.

Going by the fans' specs, the enermax AIO is a performance-oriented unit with high FPI(fins per inch). High FPI radiators need higher static pressure fans to cut through the... erm, thickness.
For the silence-focused units, the fans have lower rpm and the radiator FPI isn't as thick, thus it's easier to move air though.

@Panzerbjorne39
If you wanted to maintain a certain degree of noise, then a model with low rpm fans would've been the way to go.
Yeah I did my reasearch on the aio before purchase and everywhere said the fans are loud and I don’t like loud fans so that’s exactly why I changed them to the fans that I did. The question is, did using these Arctic lower rpm and cfm fans gimp the aio performance? Or is just my UEFI settings that are the issue.
 
I don’t like your post it’s honestly not helpful at all. I did educate myself. The overclock UEFI settings I used were based on the new egg video done by JJ at Asus on overclocking 9th gen Intel. I followed his instructions and did the best I could. I’ve also spent hours googling settings. JJ recommendations are the opposite of the meta everyone uses and it made sense to me.
He said auto vcore is more efficient and that he doesn’t use LLC setting and leaves it on auto. I’ve played with LLC settings and it hasn’t done anything with temps. Effectively telling me to go read on other forums isn’t helping. That’s why I’m here. If you have specific instructions you can assist me with to resolve my heat issue let’s hear it.
Just gonna through this out there. But have you even tried overclocking the way 99% of the people do and see if it works better than the one video you found online?
 

Phaaze88

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Yeah I did my reasearch on the aio before purchase and everywhere said the fans are loud and I don’t like loud fans so that’s exactly why I changed them to the fans that I did. The question is, did using these Arctic lower rpm and cfm fans gimp the aio performance? Or is just my UEFI settings that are the issue.
I would say BOTH are the issue.
1)Current fans can't move as much air through the rad as the stock fans, which, as I mentioned before were prioritized for performance. Using quieter fans is a detriment because of the high FPI of the radiator.
Just in case it caused some confusion, FPI isn't the same as radiator thickness: https://www.ekwb.com/blog/radiators-part-1-thickness-fpi/

2)Your bios settings appear to be a tad aggressive.
 

Karadjgne

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What I mean by an education is exactly that. Your cpu is different to JJ's, it'll respond differently, the voltages will be different. Or maybe close enough to be the same. There's simply no telling.

LLC is a pre-emptive voltage. As load and voltage demands change so fast, you get vdroop. The VRM's can't supply the voltage as fast as the vdroop moves. So LLC is a voltage applied to be the stop-gap and lower the overall vdroop. But, being an applied voltage, it also affects the upper range too, so you set vcore for 1.3v and LLC adds more making the cpu see 1.4v. Which jack's your temps up. By using Auto, the LLC is set at whatever it thinks it might need, not what it actually does need, so under heavy loads you don't get 1.3v, the cpu gets 1.5v instead, further complicating the thermal problem.

VID is what the cpu demands the VRM's supply, vcore is what the cpu actually uses and you'd use a positive or negative offset to raise or lower VID. You'll want vid to be @ 0.05v above vcore for streamlined optimized voltages and lowest temps. Lowering vid can also lower vcore, with no detriment, unless you lower it too far and then becomes unstable. You set vcore to 1.38v right off the rip because that's what someone else used. It's entirely possible for that cpu to only need 1.275v with a 1.3v vid and medium LLC and still be perfectly stable.

A good OC can take months to dial in perfectly, your post simply said you jacked up the OC and now it won't cool with even the largest decent coolers. Only conclusion is whatever you did do wasn't well thought out nor implemented correctly for Your cpu. It worked for his, doesn't mean it'll work for yours. That's why I said get educated on OC for that specific cpu, so you can have an idea how exactly to tailor your OC to get it to do what You want, within the boundaries of what It can do.

Sorry if you don't like that idea, but it's OC, there's nothing set in stone about exact procedure or results.
 
Like has been said overclocking is rarely ever using someone else's settings. But instead knowing exactly what those settings do, and how to make them work for your cpu.

There's an excellent guide on here that will walk you through step by step how to do it. Including what apps to use for the inevitable HOURS of thermal compliance and stress testing to ensure stability and lowest possible temps.

Saying you dont like someone's post because they've tried to explain where you went wrong is not going to get you more help.

Your cooler is plenty efficient to cool your cpu, your bios options are not.

Take the time to learn how it all functions together and spend the time to do it correctly. You'll end up with a nice cool overclocked cpu.
 

Panzerbjorne39

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Wel guys. Thanks especially to @blazerboy and @Phaaze88 for their assistance with this. The primary issue with the temp was the fans! Nothing to do with my overclock settings. I swapped the Arctic fans out for the stock fans and it was an immediately noticeable temp reduction.
When I originally considered using the artic pressure fans I was focused on the RPM difference and thought it would be ok. I had no idea how big of a difference the fans could make in this application. My PC is now sitting at 5.1 All core @1.385vcore that adapts up to 1.403 max. High temp under load is now 78. Excellent!
 
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