i7 5820k Extremely Hot - Broken?

jazzmac251

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Apr 23, 2011
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(tl;dr in bold at the bottom)

I think I broke my proc :ouch:

I've had it set to a pretty hot overclocked 4.4ghz for a while. It would get up into the 90s if I let it, but that would almost never, ever happen since nothing I do really taxes my CPU that much.

Well, all that changed when I played a little game called Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator...

For those that don't know, this game lets you spawn in tens of thousands of individual units, all with AI pathfinding and their own animations, to battle each other in an epic simulation. The only thing that limits how many units you can spawn in is your hardware's ability to render them at an acceptable framerate. This is actually the best CPU stress test I've ever used.

After messing around with it for a night seemingly without incident - and absolutely CRUSHING my processor in the process - the next day I discovered my overclock was now unstable. I couldn't seem to run the game without it throwing up a BSOD. I figured I had finally run into the wall of what I suppose was always an unstable overclock.

Checking the thermals on a whim, I was shocked to see UEBS was causing my CPU to produce some crazy high readings that my H100i simply couldn't deal with. It was hovering around 105c - way too freaking high - and must have been doing so the entire time I was playing the game previously. These were higher numbers than I had ever seen when stress-testing my overclock a few years ago!

I decided to downclocked my CPU to 4.3ghz, which allowed me to shave off a LOT of voltage. But, ever since that first night, my chip will get in moods where it just dumps out MASSIVE amount of heat for absolutely no reason. For example, I just resumed my sleep and the CPU was basically just idling. It was sitting at the lowest multiplier of 12x, Vcore was roughly 0.75V, CPU Input was 1.8-1.84v, and my CPU load in the single digits...

...yet my freaking IDLE temps were 65c! My H100i's water temps shot up to 49c (water temps measured independently of CPU temps) and the fans were screaming for dear life to try to compensate - meaning its thermal dissipation capabilities were completely saturated! From what!??

A few minutes later, the CPU temp inexplicably dropped into the mid 40s allowing the fans to quickly blow off the excess heat in the H100i's coolant. Now I'm idling at 45c (normal) with an H100i coolant temp of 38.5c (normal). No change in CPU voltages, load, or multiplier the whole time.

Okay, what did I break and how screwed am I? :(