.Apex.

At stock speeds it should be fairly easy to cool This is a great option for the price https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-BK008-Pure-Rock-Slim/dp/B01KVNCEIG Can't you wait though for your other cooler to arrive?

You're welcome, I'm glad it's working!

In my system with an 8700K I cannot for the life of me manage to tame the temperatures that Prime95 Small FFT generates, and it's mostly because my CPU has thermal paste between the die and the IHS, so I stopped caring about reaching that type of standard, the fact that your CPU is under reasonable temperatures at that load is way more than good enough.

That loop temp is about average for liquid coolers, and you're right in some sense that the temperature difference between the loop and the CPU would indicate the heat transfer efficiency, but I would expect that from a Zen 2 CPU as the die is much smaller and therefor the heat is concentrated so it doesn't dissipate the heat as well, you might improve that if you used better thermal paste but I doubt it'd be affected by much, this cooling performance is inline with other liquid cooled systems I've seen using a Zen 2 CPU. Though I should mention that Prime95 Small FFTs is extremely

Assessing idling temps are difficult without measuring the power usage in each scenario, I'd look more into the maximum temperature as that's more consistent to measure and having a loop temperature of 35C sounds about right, it shouldn't be as hot as your CPU as then it would be worthless as there's no temperature difference. I can't tell you if the AIO is working optimally or properly but it's definitely working, if not then you'd thermal throttle instantly. Comparing a 240mm AIO with a single-tower aircooler should be similar in performance, I think..

That's strange, I've never heard about incompatibility issues with a Gigabyte GPU and MSI Afterburner which makes me think It's either driver issues or a BIOS issue. Try using DDU to completely uninstall all the GPU drivers on your system and reinstall the newest ones and try downclocking again, and while you're at it, download GPU-Z to get the BIOS version of your card and export the BIOS file and upload it here, and take a screenshot of GPU-Z's main window as well. DDU: https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html GPU-

Or does reverting to stock memory clock only happen at reboot?

Even if you keep MSI Afterburner open it would still refuse to reduce the memory clock? hm sounds like then there might be a custom BIOS What's the model of your GPU? you could try the brand software instead for overclocking

After a restart it should revert back to stock speed unless you've made MSI Afterburner to apply your custom settings at startup, though 6800Mhz might not have been enough, try turning it down to 6000 and reduce your core clock speed as well to possibly 1850-1900, if it still causes artifacts then the VRAM or even the GPU die are most likely defective

It would not be a significant upgrade CPU wise especially not for the amount of money you're going to pay to fully transition to an AMD CPU, I suggest you wait for the next Ryzen CPU and buy an RTX 3080 instead as an upgrade if you can get your hands on it. Between the 9800X and 5800X there's a 25% Singlecore improvement which would be significant if you were to raise the amount of cores, but extra cores in your case wouldn't affect gaming performance, and you could lower that gap even further if you were to overclock the 9800X which would put it in the range of 10-15%.

Looks like VRAM instability artifacts which usually occur when the card has been used for a long time which wouldn't be the case for a 2070 Super, or that it has been stressed or heated consistently for days such as the case for mining or it was simply just in non-ideal conditions inside a case, though it could also be that the owner received it defective like this. Though it also might indicate that the VRAM frequency is too high, a miner could have flashed a custom BIOS on it, can you check what your GPU Core and VRAM frequencies are? regardless if there is a custom BIOS or not,

The card does have a "FanStop" feature, and it's called 3D Active Fan, and it seems like you can disable it through their Aorus Engine software I don't think the GPU has a BIOS switch, it's not listed on their webpage and manufacturers don't usually mention that which is annoying, but if you do find it, you can try switching it while the system is off

I'm talking about the BIOS switch on the GPU itself, which you haven't mentioned, but if it's an ASUS GPU then I think it does have a physical BIOS switch What's the model of the GPU?

Generally, applying thermal pads on the chips surrounding the CPU/GPU is okay but that is usually done on desktop components that have imperfect heatsink plates so they require thermal pads as the thermal paste wouldn't even make contact, but this seems to be designed to make contact with the surrounding chips so that must have been done for a reason as thermal paste is much better, and considering laptops have inadequate heatsinks it's better to apply thermal paste if you have the option to do so. As for which type of thermal paste, you need a non-electrically-conductive one like

50-60C is usually the range for the "FanStop" feature which turns off the fans below the threshold and turn them on when above, so that might be interfering with your software, usually there is a BIOS switch on the board that puts the card in "high-performance" mode and disables FanStop But yeah this is more likely a software issue not properly taking control of the card rather than a hardware one