Cooling help

nasabeau79468 · September 15, 2021

Hello,
So, I am a bit lost here on what could be going wrong. I set up my first custom loop and expected to see great cooling performance, but am having trouble with the CPU. It idles in the high 40s-50s, and on p95 smallest FFTs its at 92C. on small FFTs is a more reasonable 65-70, which in my experience is closer to the temps real loads will put on the CPU, but I feel like it shouldn't have an average idle of 50C. I tried undervolting the snot out of it and it didn't seem to help much. the GPU however under full load is staying in the 40s, idles 30s. My GPU is almost constantly under full load because I mine when I'm not gaming to help convince my wife a 3090 is an investment lol.
My rig:
Ryzen 9 3900x with EK Quantum Velocity AMD Waterblock
ASUS Prime x470-pro
EVGA RTX3090 FTW3 with EK-Quantum Vector FTW3 Water block and backplate
Corsair XD3 RGB pump
EK-CoolStream PE 360 (triple rad) with EK vardar RGB fans configured intake
EK-CoolStream PE 240 (double rad) with EK vardar RGB fans configured intake
1x Corsair ML-140 fan Configured Exhaust
Corsair commander pro and Lighting node pro which control all fans and pump.
32GB Corsair RGB pro ram 3200mhz
Thermaltake Toughpower 750 Gold
Corsair Air 540 case
Way too much storage split between 2 m.2 NVMe drives and a Dell Perc H710 raid array.

I am sure the mounting pressure is good, not 100% on the thermal paste application but it would be on the side of too much not to little, and its hard to hurt performance with too much (siting the test by steve at gamers nexus for that one). I was almost positive this would be enough cooling. is this just a thing with the ryzen processors? is the GPU constantly running going to hurt it? is there something I am missing? Loop setup is Pump>Rad>Rad>CPU>GPU>Pump. I set this up a couple of weeks ago and am still getting some bubbles out although that slowed down a LOT and the level in my res is MOSTLY stable at this point it would seem so I think the bubbles are all out. anyway, any advice on this would be appreciated

Ravendarat · September 15, 2021

Its maybe a tad high on the CPU but I am running a Ryzen 5800x and under full load im in the low to mid 80s, so depending on the ambient temp in your room you might be about right. Also you are bringing all the heat into the case with all your fans set as intakes on the rads, you could try flipping the fans on one of the two rads to exhaust to help balance that out some. But based on your gpu temp it seems like the loop itself is doing its job just fine

nasabeau79468 · September 15, 2021

5 minutes ago, Ravendarat said:

Its maybe a tad high on the CPU but I am running a Ryzen 5800x and under full load im in the low to mid 80s, so depending on the ambient temp in your room you might be about right. Also you are bringing all the heat into the case with all your fans set as intakes on the rads, you could try flipping the fans on one of the two rads to exhaust to help balance that out some. But based on your gpu temp it seems like the loop itself is doing its job just fine

yeah, I was wondering if the fan setup might be contributing but had the same thought on the GPU temps. my thought process on those is I wanted positive pressure since the case has TONS of holes that dust likes to go in, and I was worried if I had one rad pulling hot air in, that meant the other rad was pulling hot air across it, which (maybe?) would hurt it's cooling capacity. with both as intakes they both get fresh air, although I am sure my mobo is straight up not having a good time. I will say the temperature in the room is variable, but doesn't seem to have more than a degree or two effect on the idle temps which surprised me.

Edited September 15, 2021 by nasabeau79468
additional thought

Demonic Donut · September 16, 2021

I mean, you're hitting it with an insanely heavy workload... I'm not all that surprised tbh. It's a big and high wattage chip, it's hard to cool.

You're not going to get better without delidding and doing direct die cooling. You're basically at the limit of what the IHS can transfer and the water block can take away.

If you aren't experiencing high temps during normal use, don't sweat it.

If you think you have an airflow problem, take the side panel off and point a box fan at it and try again. But unless you're CPU temp (loop temp) steadily rises/gets too high, more airflow or more radiator isn't going to help you.