I7-6700k temperature and voltage issues

[Hankse]

So I've just made a new build and went to test the temperatures through AIDA.

 

It's an I7-6700k, cooled by a 4-year old (but thoroughly cleaned) Akasa Venom Voodoo (with Arctic Silver 5 as thermal paste), both mounted on a Asus Z170 Pro Gaming. The case is a NZXT H440 with both side panels open. Ambient temperature at 25-27º

I'm not a veteran at high-end build but, I find these results... bizarre. The amplitude of temperature is far too wide, jumps from 50 to 76 in mere seconds and keeps on oscillating, is it normal nowadays?

I'd be glad if someone could see the AIDA result and enlighten me on what's going on (also, note the CPU usage graph is bigger, but that's just because I changed the temps report to every 1 second instead of 5 in the middle of the test).

Along with it, I noticed the voltage was at 1.4+V and clock at ~4.1 GHz during the test. I haven't overclocked it, shouldn't it be around 1.2V with this clock? (PSU is XFX XTR750 750Watt)

And, what would be the target temperature here? And at how many degrees should I start to worry?

[Praesi]

4.1ghz is less than no OC Boost. And why do you have the sidepanels open?

 

Edit. ok you have not OCd now. Weird. volt should 1.25 @ stock. Temps are  very high for no OC. Close the sides and get a better cooler.

[GTBTK]

1.4V is very high. I guess the vcore bios setting is currently "auto"? At that voltage, the CPU should be under an  AIO rather than a 5 yo air cooler

 

I Suggest that you manually set vcore to 1.25V in the bios and your temps should end up being much more under control.

[Hankse]

6 hours ago, Praesi said:

4.1ghz is less than no OC Boost. And why do you have the sidepanels open?

 

Edit. ok you have not OCd now. Weird. volt should 1.25 @ stock. Temps are  very high for no OC. Close the sides and get a better cooler.

Sidepanels were open because I was first running and testing it, so I was still tweaking around and decided not to close it yet. It is closed now, though.
I'm waiting for a Hyper 212X to arrive, it'll probably be done in a couple of days, then i'll change it.

 

5 hours ago, GTBTK said:

1.4V is very high. I guess the vcore bios setting is currently "auto"? At that voltage, the CPU should be under an  AIO rather than a 5 yo air cooler

 

I Suggest that you manually set vcore to 1.25V in the bios and your temps should end up being much more under control.

It was, yes. I couldn't manually change it to 1.25V, i'm not very familiar to BIOS tweaking. The only option that had a voltage value in it, would not allow me to chance this value if when changed to "manual" instead of "auto". Couldn't find a straightforward enough guide on how to change it, most of them mentioned LLC values and some other things i'm not familiar with.
What I did in the bios was enable the UEF (not sure if that's right) power saver and it helped a bit. The voltage wouldn't go over 1.4 anymore (as seen on another AIDA test I'll mention later).
The strange thing is that in the bios, it does say the voltage is at 1.296.

///
 

To try something else, I rendered a 1920x1080 video in Sony Vegas, and it does put cpu load at over 95%. The result was that the voltage was around 1.2V during the time vegas was open, but it still reached 1.4V during AIDA stress test.
The temperature reached a maximum of 77ºC during AIDA test and low-60'sº during rendering, but still with the large amplitude and spikes.
The clock was stable at around 4.0GHz.

Another test was a 10-minute gaming session of Titanfall 2, the voltage was around 1.2-1.35V, with very few spikes over that.

 

 

Should I just leave it as it is, or still be worried? I will change the cooler to a Hyper 212X in a few days.

[GTBTK]

I'm not there to look obviously and i dont have an Asus Z170 to test it on but It still seems that something in the bios is conflicting to let those voltages hit 1.4v. Those high voltages will impact the life of the CPU, particularly if the cooling is not designed to cope with that sort of heat load.

 

I would suggest that you think about resetting the bios to optimized defaults. Just make sure you check the sata interface settings and make sure they are the same as what you are running now. On my Z68 board, the sata setting is reset to raid mode and disables the hard drives if you reset to defaults so I have to change it back to AHCI and re-enable the drives before the PC will boot.

 

I just did a quick search and found this. it is just a run through to show you what is in the bios. I am sure there are other vids around that will give you a step by step guide to set up the bios for overclocking etc. Asus does have step by step automatic OC utilities you can use if you want but that may have been the cause of the high voltages in the first place. Worth taking a look and seeing what happens, you can always reset everything if id doesnt work out well..

 

 

To set the cpu voltages settings manually, you need to run the UEFI settings in advance mode (press F7 at the uefi front page) a and go into the AI tweaker section. 

[porina]

It's not unusual for mobos to offer a default overclock. The 6700k is only rated to turbo to 4.2 with one core active. All cores active, it is 4.0. So if you see 4.1 all cores active, that might be some form of mobo OC enhanced turbo, and when they do that, they often boost voltages also. Look for any turbo or optimisation setting, and if there is an option try selecting Intel turbo. I know it is on some of my Asus boards and other manufacturers do similar.

 

Temp fluctuation can be normal depending on the nature of the load. If you use aida64, try only FPU test as a more consistent higher stress to help indicate a harsher load condition.