CPU getting extremely hot even at low loads

[visualpizza]

Hi,
I just bought a new system and noticed my CPU's temperatures to be very high at almost no load. My CPU is an i7-7700k and I use the Noctua U12S as fan, according to HWMonitor, on the desktop my CPU idles at around 1-2% and is at 48°C. When playing HITMAN the processor peaks at 97% and the temperatures peak at 86°C. I tried Prime95 to stress test my CPU and at one point it even reached 100°C ! This is definitely not normal, is it? The Fans are indeed spinning and while HWMonitor shows the correct RPM's it also shows under the "Fans PWM" section that all fans are at 0%, what does that mean?

 

I am really at a loss right now, is my CPU fan just not good enough? What is going on? Any help is appreciated and thanks in advance.

[Jurrunio]

Applied thermal paste yet?

[RadiatingLight]

Remount the cooler, and remember thermalpaste, like @Jurrunio said.

[visualpizza]

13 hours ago, Jurrunio said:

Applied thermal paste yet?

Yes, with the paste that was shipped with the noctua.

13 hours ago, RadiatingLight said:

Remount the cooler, and remember thermalpaste, like @Jurrunio said.

I will try this tomorrow and report back, it's like 3 a.m. where I am.

[LogicalDrm]

Which mobo? How are fans being controlled? Which header did you plug CPU fan? If fan is at full speed when gaming, temps should be lot lower. Under stress you need to watch voltages if they are left to auto mode.

[Seanzky]

Also make sure it's mounted properly (even pressure on top of the IHS with no gaps).

[visualpizza]

I just remounted the cooler.

1 hour ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

Which mobo? How are fans being controlled? Which header did you plug CPU fan? If fan is at full speed when gaming, temps should be lot lower. Under stress you need to watch voltages if they are left to auto mode.

Motherboard is Gigabyte Z270X-Gaming 7. The fans are in PWM mode, according to the BIOS, if that's what you mean. I am not sure about voltages.

 

7 minutes ago, Seanzky said:

Also make sure it's mounted properly (even pressure on top of the IHS with no gaps).

All screws are screwed in tightly and evenly and it sits flat on the CPU. 

 

I took a bit more thermal paste this time and temperatures have dropped by maybe 4-5 degrees, not really what I was hoping for

 

Might be worth to mention that we have environmental degrees of 26-30°C here atm. ?

 

Also my fans can do 1500 RPM as far as I understand and they are already at 1000RPM at idle, which leads me to think the fans are underpowered for the heat this cpu produces?

[Seanzky]

I have Noctua NH-U14S with two NF-A15 fans in a push-pull configuration. The other differences, other than motherboard and all that that, between our set up is that my ambient is much lower at 22*C. My temps read much, much lower. My CPU at 100%, running forever, refuses to go past 68*C.

 

I am not that familiar with the NH-U12S, but I don't think the temperature discrepancy between our setup should be that much. My idle temperatures hover around 34*C. Do you have another CPU cooler you can test against to find out for sure?

[LogicalDrm]

1 hour ago, RyderXF said:

I just remounted the cooler.

Motherboard is Gigabyte Z270X-Gaming 7. The fans are in PWM mode, according to the BIOS, if that's what you mean. I am not sure about voltages.

 

Voltages are auto, if you haven't done anything to them. You can monitor votlages with MSI Afterburner or HWmonitor while gaming, and with CPU-Z when running stress tests. Having voltages on auto can cause higher-than-normal temps when stress testing.

 

As for control, I take you are using automatic, not silent or some custom curve.

 

1 hour ago, RyderXF said:

Might be worth to mention that we have environmental degrees of 26-30°C here atm. ?

 

That has some impact. Any reviews you see usually report temps with room temp removed. Thats because in princible each degree room temp goes up, so does component temps. That in mind, you max dropping 5C from 86C max and room being maybe 6C over "normal", your max temps are just fine.

 

1 hour ago, RyderXF said:

Also my fans can do 1500 RPM as far as I understand and they are already at 1000RPM at idle, which leads me to think the fans are underpowered for the heat this cpu produces?

 

I don't think so. It may be more about U12S being bit too small for 7700K. But your temps are still good considering all thats going on.

[visualpizza]

6 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

As for control, I take you are using automatic, not silent or some custom curve.

Oh...yes the curve is on automatic.

 

7 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

I don't think so. It may be more about U12S being bit too small for 7700K. But your temps are still good considering all thats going on.

 

1 hour ago, Seanzky said:

Do you have another CPU cooler you can test against to find out for sure?

I don't but I just ordered a NH-D15 I'll try out beginning of next week to find out if it really comes down to the maybe a bit too small cooler, will report back when I have the results. Just for clarification, the CPU peaked very very shorlty at 92°C playing Hitman, like a millisecond, is it safe to proceed using the PC while I wait for the bigger cooler or should/can I maybe downclock the CPU as to not damage it so I can keep using it? Or is it theoretically, while high, still fine to run that way? I am a bit scared of ruining my CPU, especially if you consider its price...

[LogicalDrm]

1 minute ago, RyderXF said:

... Just for clarification, the CPU peaked very very shorlty at 92°C playing Hitman, like a millisecond, is it safe to proceed using the PC while I wait for the bigger cooler or should/can I maybe downclock the CPU as to not damage it so I can keep using it? Or is it theoretically, while high, still fine to run that way? I am a bit scared of ruining my CPU, especially if you consider its price...

You should set volts to manual, to something like 1.15V or 1.1V. That should take care of things. Clocks don't actually raise that much temps, its common misconception I also once had. Voltages are main reason why temps go up.

 

Was it 92C on single core, all cores or package (usually refered as average or something like that).

[visualpizza]

3 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

Was it 92C on single core, all cores or package (usually refered as average or something like that).

Package. Sorry for leaving out details all the time  

 

EDIT: This is a screenshot of HWMonitor after playing HITMAN and then being back to idling on desktop

Labeling is CURRENT - MIN - MAX

[Seanzky]

Just basing on the screenshot, and of course not there to see how everything is for myself, it looks like the cooler can't keep up. The idle looks normal for the cooler with your ambient temps. When CPU utilization spikes, the cooler just can't keep up with heat dissipation.

[visualpizza]

7 minutes ago, Seanzky said:

Just basing on the screenshot, and of course not there to see how everything is for myself, it looks like the cooler can't keep up. The idle looks normal for the cooler with your ambient temps. When CPU utilization spikes, the cooler just can't keep up with heat dissipation.

That sounds reasonable, thank you. I will do the downclock and report back in a few days after I installed the bigger cooler to see if that is the solution.

[LogicalDrm]

18 minutes ago, RyderXF said:

Package. Sorry for leaving out details all the time  

 

EDIT: This is a screenshot of HWMonitor after playing HITMAN and then being back to idling on desktop

Labeling is CURRENT - MIN - MAX

Those voltages are too high for non-clocked CPU. Just watching some OC guide to see what would be basic voltage and it shows that you can have 1.18-1.2V voltages just fine. That WILL drop temps by 10-15C, maybe even more. I would highly recommend doing that first.

 

For reference, 4770K I have can run under 1.1V when it would auto to 1.28V on stock clocks.

E: And no need to downclock. Just set manual or adaptive volts.

[visualpizza]

46 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

Those voltages are too high for non-clocked CPU. Just watching some OC guide to see what would be basic voltage and it shows that you can have 1.18-1.2V voltages just fine. That WILL drop temps by 10-15C, maybe even more. I would highly recommend doing that first.

 

For reference, 4770K I have can run under 1.1V when it would auto to 1.28V on stock clocks.

E: And no need to downclock. Just set manual or adaptive volts.

I set the VCore in my BIOS to 1.180V, it was 1.300V on Auto before. On idle it did not change the temperatures at all but I now got up to 64-76°C under load with a small spike of 82°C for a millisecond which is still 10°C cooler than it was spiking before.

[LogicalDrm]

16 minutes ago, RyderXF said:

I set the VCore in my BIOS to 1.180V, it was 1.300V on Auto before. On idle it did not change the temperatures at all but I now got up to 64-76°C under load with a small spike of 82°C for a millisecond which is still 10°C cooler than it was spiking before.

Thats more normal. You can test if you can go lower. Idle doesn't matter that much anyway, its just about if cooler is properly mounted or not. But seeing those load temps, they are normal. I don't know why spikes like that happen, it might be sensor error or bug.

[MysticalRainXIV]

I had similar issues with a z270 board where a bios update fixed the vcore acting up on my 7700k and brought temps down nearly 25C

[visualpizza]

1 minute ago, MysticalRainXIV said:

I had similar issues with a z270 board where a bios update fixed the vcore acting up on my 7700k and brought temps down nearly 25C

I am very scared of updating the bios so that would be my last resort  

I think my cooler is mounted correctly, it sits completely flat and very firm, nothing can move.

[MysticalRainXIV]

2 minutes ago, RyderXF said:

I am very scared of updating the bios so that would be my last resort  

Most new motherboards have a failsafe that will repair the bios if the update fails for whatever reason, but I've never had a board fail to update and I work for a computer repair place, so that a sample size of nearly 300 since I've started working here. What mobo do you have?

[LogicalDrm]

2 hours ago, RyderXF said:

I am very scared of updating the bios so that would be my last resort  

I think my cooler is mounted correctly, it sits completely flat and very firm, nothing can move.

Just take your time with it. Don't do manual reset or power off until its shows screen where its ask either to select correct boot device or to load optimized BIOS settings. Or shows Windows login screen. And having that for few mins just to be sure.

 

I have done both from Windows and using Q-Flash on Gigabyte board, both are quite easy to use.

[visualpizza]

So, here comes my update.

I installed the D-15 today BUT with a bit of a twist...the second D-15 fan wouldn't fit height wise into my case so I took the small U12S fan and used it as the second one so I might say I have a 2 tower and 1.5 fan cooler setup now.

 

Temps wise when playing HITMAN, where I would be getting 64-76 degrees on the core with ambient temps at around 26 degrees, 

I now get 68-72 degrees stable (notice it doesn't jump around as much anymore too, the temps are more stable).

 

Now, this might not seem like anything happened but today is an especially warm day and it is 32 degrees for the ambient temp, still, it manages to maintain what the U12S would only be able to barely hold at 26 degrees ambient. The temp spikes are also gone and I assume it will be way lower than that when ambient temps go back to what they were when I tested the U12S - seems to me it really was an underpowered cooler what that CPU, in my specific case and setup at least.

 

EDIT: Thank you to everyone who gave suggestions, especially for adjusting the Voltage, as well as just in general helping me building a clearer picture of what was going wrong.