That cooler should be more then fine.
But that thermal paste job, how much of that stuff did you use? haha. 
Still the motherboard’s vrm is not really great.
But basically as long as the vrm temps stay below like 95°C,
it should basically be fine.
Still strange the system seems to be mainly suffering from crashes in linux if i read this correctly?
That paste job looks perfectly fine.
Just a little dot in the center is all it really needs.
Yes, and the dot in the center spreads out to look like pic above once you put the cooler on.
It looks a little bit more like a line spread if you ask me.
Still like i said 100°C in just one minuut of prime95,
is obviously not how it supposed to be.
But prime95 is a pretty hard test for the cpu.
It’s an intel cpu. 
This is getting off topic tho.
That is correct, Linux is worse for some reason.
And the thermal paste was a dot style application. I’ll leave it at that so we stay on topic.
I put it back together now:
And it immediately froze in linux. It has done that to me in the past as well. It is unpredictable. It is frozen in that picture actually.
So I’m guessing I should probably start a return for the board then?
That’s what I’d do.
Well, if this board is going away then I’m open to suggestions on different boards if that seems like a good idea.
I just wanted something understated/black and able to handle the 10Gb card I put in. I was going with MSI because I find their UEFI config to be really easy to use compared to some others I’ve seen.
And for testing I loaded Windows on it and that also crashed shortly after logging in this time.
I’ve started doing some reading on recommended motherboards and it’s looking like the GIGABYTE Z390 AORUS PRO is favored for the 9900k.
I have a potentially related and dumb question to the MSI board though. It has an 8 and 4 pin CPU power connection but I’ve only been able to connect the 8 pin because my PSU doesn’t have two cables for that. Do I need to have both connected? I was reminded of that because the Gigabyte board was specifically mentioning it in the notes about the VRM design.
Update: I ordered the Gigabyte board. It will be here this afternoon.
In my humble opinion the PCH is defective on the original board. Under some circumstances it could also be the processor SMU/ME. Though for those the reset line is a hard control line which isn’t dependent on a working SMU.
This reset behaviour, full lockups immediately when booting Linux especially are emblematic of a bad board PCH.
While the CPU stress test temps don’t look great, these aren’t what’s going to cause something like linux to lockup at the desktop
Hope all is well after the board swap.
Just too many questions to ask and my recommendations are not too differing that others that have posted. I do have other questions:
Why Intel in 2020/1?
Why 9th Gen?
Why MSI? Did you read the reviews on it?
Seeing as how 9900kf are binned chips, it is unlikely to fail (though gpu is fused out). Pushing that much power through some boards can be volatile.
Got any other ddr4 based boards to test memory on?
Nevertheless, glad you ditched the MSI, giga-byte is not bad and hope for a smoother experience.
I do not much care for "monetary’ reasons, as I know i’ve racked in a “slush fund” for pc parts simply by cutting down on NON-essential grocery items at the supermarket (Yeah, it adds up)
My theory is simply: get the BEST or the cheapest that will do the job (I don’t see a middleground)
My pick for the motherboard would have been a supermicro (as best) or an AsRock derivative for cheapest.
My Pick: SMZ390. (10G nic, wifi… PCI lanes through bridge chip PLX874 yeah its a thing… U2 ports… makes the x299 platform obsolete)
Thanks for adding in, it does make me feel more comfortable getting more opinions on it.
The new board has shipped now so it shouldn’t be too long before we find out.
I was given the i9-9900kf, so it was a fixed element in this build. But I just prefer Intel as well. I have no rational reason to back that up, just like I would say I like grape flavored soda over orange. It just would not occur to me to choose AMD instead of Intel.
MSI because I like their UEFI software for configuring the system. I find it easy to understand and use and it was mostly the same as my last computer. I looked up linux compatibility for the board before buying it and it seemed like there was a reasonable amount of community enthusiasm for it.
I have not built a new computer since 2013, so unfortunately not.
Normally I don’t either, but with the processor being given to me at random this was an unplanned and out of budget build already.
I was actually looking at that SuperMicro board but the $/feature trade off didn’t do it for me. It isn’t that much better to justify its price for me. If I didn’t already have a dedicated 10Gb NIC then it would be more appealing.
I see. An early and unexpected Santa Claus event. I can sort of relate; spotted an Acer Haswell prebuilt and an h61 based system left at the curb on garbage day, all that was missing were their hard drives. Now I have two systems with no discernable defects, taking space up in my garage.
MSI’s bright Red&Black uefi preference really? Man, truly I cannot say I’ve enjoyed my experiences with them (z97 + b150) based systems. You do have have a good base for the next 5 years (maximum) and gaming/encoding is respectable.
Well, its easy to reason, soda will give you obesity and orange is just fruit 
And what I meant to say, go AMD 
But seriously, since you decided to replace mobo, lets hope it’s not the CPU that is the culprit. The one thing that started this troublesome build.
I got the new motherboard, it freezes in the exact same way.
Nothing left but to RMA the CPU now I guess.
“Seeing as how 9900kf are binned chips, it is unlikely to fail (though gpu is fused out)”
Here I am eating crow, the 1% I suspected has come to fruition. (Are “f” chips not just bad gpu’s, or both cpu+gpu but fused off in order to “salvage” the chip)?
I would presume so. Sorry about the goose chase.
No, just the single 8 pin should be fine basically.
That board has a significantly better vrm yeah.
to bad the system is still crashing under linux doe.
This could be allot of things…
But as soon as you get a new cpu back, then we likely know more.
Just curious which exact psu models did you use to test with?
