Greetings, community,
Some time ago I decided to move away from air cooling. The road was long, and at first it was AIO, but in December I finally made that final step into moving my CPU from Kraken x72 to a full custom water cooling (started off from GPU, and now have both of them sitting comfortably in a custom loop).
But one thing has been keeping me concerned - the CPU in Cinebench R20 has 2 cores spiking at 93 C (sometimes even managed to get to 96, after which I started to wonder).
My specs are 9900k, MSI z390 meg ace, MSI 2080Ti. For the cooling, I started with EK’s products (not many vendors make waterblocks for my GPU), and all went/is extremely well (GPU core sits in the 52 C at peak… 54 if to play something, which is constantly peaking the load to 100%).
For the CPU though… I am concerned. I got a Heatkiller IV, which from the start seemed off - the “background” placement screws didn’t fit right with the block so I needed to loosen them up just to install the block. But after a few rounds made it work (and can’t say that there’s some problem with that).
Have used MSI’s “SW/HW overclock” nob at 2, which is 4.9GHz (later saw that first two cores are set to 5.1, but never go there when I test them.
The temperatures seem strange - almost all cores seem to peak at 84c (or even 80+). Two specific - 92/94/96.
Tried manually setting to 4.9 all core with 1.295v for the core (1.31v if AUTO). Although other cores scored down a bit in terms of temp, those two in particular remained.
Then I saw DazMode’s video -
And that started to worry me. I’ve repasted several times already with Kryonaught (even manually spreading the paste). No luck.
Today I went for the “you know what? Muck it” and pulled out from the shelf my old Noctua paste.
I remember from that video that Heatkiller managed to have some strange results due to the block not sitting correctly. Well, this time I specifically counted the number of turns I made.
At first I even didn’t tighten the block (if to recall the manual from Kraken - “it’s not a tower base, so you don’t need to tighten it”). Well. Had to interrupt Cinebench since those cores started to peak to 100. And then I started to tighten the screws.
Here’s where I am now:
And I really don’t recall having witnessed “those two cores” with Kraken.
Really thinking that either I’m too novice for Heatkiller, or there is something really REALLY wrong here. Although I’m not willing to go for another cpu block and just use this one until I go for a new CPU.