Hey folks!
I'm trying to diagnose an issue remotely for a friend. She has a 9700k and an RTX 2070 from iBuyPower. The cooler is some kind of 120mm AIO with push/pull. She's had this build for a bit over a year, and very recently the PC has started to hard shut off while she's playing (FF 14). No blue screen, just cut to black. At first I assumed power supply instead of overheating, as I had a similar issue in the past. I wanted to be able to reliably induce the issue so we could tell if we fixed it, by stressing the parts and getting the PSU to shut off.
I had her download and run Furmark to start. The GPU handled it fine, but weirdly a single CPU core spiked to high utilization, and the entire CPU got real toasty (100+C on a core). You can see the temps and utilization in the attached pic. AFAIK Furmark does barely anything to CPUs; I ran it on my rig today and my CPU stayed at largely idle, so that was weird. But in any case, the CPU shouldn't be getting that hot, especially not when a single core is fired up. At that point I favored stopping instead of trying to induce the shutdown.
Potential things:
1. The cooler is bad, maybe the pump
2. The cooler and/or thermal paste is installed poorly/insufficiently
3. Some kind of hardware fault causing the CPU to get abnormally hot
4. Some kind of software issue causing excess current?
She can feel the the AIO tubes vibrating. I had her turn off the PC, tilt the case a couple of times to get air bubbles moving around, and listen for water flow as it turned on, but we can't yet confirm that the pump is definitely moving water.
#2-4 I think get progressively less likely, as I'd be surprised as to why it's suddenly becoming so power hungry, but I couldn't give you any examples of 3 and 4. And even if the cooler install was insufficient, why would any of 2-4 start becoming a major problem _now_?
I'm having her order thermal paste to try reseating the CPU cooler with fresh paste, as the simplest and cheapest option.
Any thoughts/ideas on what else we should consider or test? Thanks in advance.