Msi 970 Gaming for FX 8350

So, you have ZERO fans bringing ANY cool air INTO the case? That's probably 95% of your problem. You should probably have, at MINIMUM, two more fans installed as intake fans bringing cool air in. With your current configuration I'm surprised you can do anything demanding at all without the VRMs throttling or shutting the system down.

Just having exhaust fans is not good enough. Until, and ONLY until, you can install two more fans to intake (Read as: PULL) fresh cool air into the case, I would move that top fan to the front of the case as an intake. Right now you are relying on ONLY the negative pressure effect of having two exhaust fans to cool what we know to be one of the hottest running CPU and VRM families to have ever existed in the FX series processors and 970/990FX chipsets. Not going to be sufficient, as I said.

I really doubt the motherboard itself is to blame or has anything to do with it, although, if you've been running it in this sweatbox fashion for a long period of time, it's entirely possible that you've cooked the VRMs or northbridge to the point where it might not be possible to return to a normal thermal envelope. I'd at least try though because even if you have to replace the motherboard at some point, you will STILL need additional cooling. Modern systems, and especially the FX family, do not do well without sufficient cooling and right now you are using hot air to try and cool the CPU with since there is likely a VERY small amount of cool air reaching your CPU cooler.

I suspect that those temps you have shown me above were taken with the sytem completely at idle. Has to be, either that or the thermal sensors are cooked, because there is no possible way to have those kinds of temps under loaded operating conditions with ANY AMD CPU in recent memory, or possibly EVER. Get two more fans. Install them in the front. Use that top fan in front for now. Do NOT just turn the fan around in it's current location as you will make matters worse.

So how many fans do you have now? Two in front bringing air into the case, one in the rear and one in the top taking air out?

Sure, it's possible that you cooked the VRMs on the motherboard, but, that would usually mean you'd be seeing some kind of issues. CPU or memory errors. Shut downs. Severe throttling. Something.

What CPU cooler are you using? Are you using the stock CPU cooler?

Yes, one more fan in the top rear as exhaust. If possible I would try to put a 140mm fan there rather than a 120mm fan. Are your front fans 120mm fans?

When talking about fan orientation, any fan blowing OUT of the case you can refer to as exhaust and any fan bringing air IN to the case is of course an intake fan. If you use that language, intake and exhaust, anybody who knows about computers at ALL will know what you are talking about and you will be on the same page as them.

What do you mean by when you wee changing out the thermal paste and thermal tape? You don't have both thermal paste AND a thermal pad in between the CPU and the bottom of the CPU cooler heatsink do you?

How much thermal paste did you apply, exactly? You should not have used more than about 1/3 the size of a #2 pencil eraser (When the eraser is new and by 1/3, I mean 1/3 of the part that sticks out past the metal end of the pencil).

Or, you could call it about in between 1/3 and 1/2 the size of a dry pinto bean. Not a white bean or a red bean, but a dry pinto bean. 1/2 the size of that is not too much and 1/3 the size is probably not too little. Any more or less than that and you might have poor heat transfer to the heatsink base.

This review I wrote a while back outlines that exact cooler and how to solve problems with it. Pay particular attention to the part about how to fasten the base down, which I go over in detail, because that is what causes most people to have problems with the 212 EVO. 99% of the time when they go back and check this they find it is the reason their cooler is not working as good as it should.

It's not the greatest cooler anyhow and the mounting system it uses kind of sucks. There a lot better coolers you can get for under 30 bucks. I think a better cooler is a good investment that can be reused over and over again, from one build to the next, so it makes sense to use something of decent quality. For now though, check the things I mentioned as outlined here.

http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-2520482/solving-temperature-issues-hyper-212-evo.html


It might also be worth figuring out a way to rig up a northbridge cooler with a custom mount and a small PWM or voltage controlled 3 pin fan, whatever will work with whatever empty fan header you might have on your motherboard, or you might have to use a fan splitter to use one of the motherboard fan headers for two fans if there are no empty fan headers left.

Something similar to one of these. Not necessarily one of these, but just so you get the idea. A little 40mm fan.

http://www.frozencpu.com/cat/l3/g36/c365/s942/list/p1/Fans-12_Volt_Fans_-_PWM-40mm_x_28mm_PWM_Fans-Page1.html

somehow, similar to this, to help keep that area cool if you still have heat issues after all of the above steps have been addressed.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/diy-gaming-rig-720,1266-5.html


There might even be a better way to attach one to the heatsink on your northbridge, I'd have to look into it further if it even gets to that point if the other items don't help.

So, maybe the problem is how your settings are set up. Here's what I like to do, and it does not adversely affect anything. It will still work perfectly fine.

In your advanced power plan settings under CPU power management, make sure that the minimum is set to 5% and the maximum is set to 100%. If the minimum is set to 100% like some performance power plans cause it to default to, the CPU cores never get a chance to "rest". So setting that to 5% and 100% ensures that if the core is needed it will instantly react and if necessary, run at 100%. If that core is not needed it will downclock itself according to the profile that is already inherently part of the architecture of the motherboard.

Also, in the bios make sure that cool and quiet is enabled and that turbo core is also enabled.

You should be able to use your CPU for as long of an extended period as you want, there should not be anything detrimental about doing that. Honestly, what I'd probably do at this point is set the CPU power profile to 5% and 10% like I said, and then go into the bios and find the tab or the function key where you can set the bios to "optimized default" settings. Then save the settings, exit, allow it to boot into windows, restart, go back into the bios and make sure that cool n' quiet is enabled and that turbo core is enabled. If you still have issues with the temperatures then go back into the bios and disable turbo core. Don't forget to save settings after making any changes in the bios.

I wouldn't get the same board. Get a good board if you're going to keep that CPU in service for a while.

Are you in the USA or elsewhere?

Are you really sure you want to invest money in this platform? Honestly, since this platform is basically dead now, it's been end of life with no new products and nobody manufacturing neither CPUs nor motherboards for the AM3+ platform for over a year now, so any motherboard still out there worth using, that's new, is seriously expensive. Cheapest price I could find on the motherboard you have right now is about 250 bucks new.

Are you looking to go with a new board or a used one? Because for 250 bucks, which is just about what the asking prices start at on ANY decent 990FX or 970 chipset AM3+ motherboard are starting at for new old stock, it's hard to justify.

I'd REALLY recommend putting that money towards a newer platform that will destroy the performance of what you could possibly get from that setup, even with a big fat overclock on it. It wouldn't be all THAT much more to go with a new CPU, board and memory than just buying that motherboard. Well, it would be more, but it would at least be money better spent. I'm more than happy to help you find a good board, but it won't be cheap unless you go with a used board and then of course, even if you buy from a pretty trustworthy ebay seller, you are still taking somewhat of a risk that nothing is wrong with the board.

Since these FX systems tended to run so hot, that's a pretty big risk in my opinion. Surely there ARE some perfectly fine used 990FX boards out there, and one of those WOULD be a lot cheaper and then potentially make it worth the investment, but you still end up with a five year old platform that can't even be a lowly i3 from this generation.

I'd be inclined to recommend something like this, rather than going with that. For less than a hundred bucks more than it would cost just to get a good motherboard, if you buy one new, for the system you have now, you could upgrade to this with an overclockable Ryzen 5 1500x that has 4 cores/8 threads, 8GB of DDR4-2666 memory and a fairly decent Gigabyte Gaming board that has shown itself to be very stable and capable of decent overclocking with Ryzen CPUs. It's worth considering. Plus, it gives you a platform you can upgrade later to an even better CPU later down the road if you wish. With what you have now, that's it. There is nowhere to go from what you have. And I'd say that conservatively this Ryzen configuration probably offers you at least 25% better performance than that FX-8350 at stock settings with no overclock.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1500X 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($164.00 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-AB350-GAMING 3 ATX AM4 Motherboard ($84.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Patriot - Viper Elite 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2666 Memory ($94.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $343.98
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-11-30 04:07 EST-0500


If however you still wish to go with a new motherboard, about the only one I can find that is truly a very good quality board, much better than that 970 chipset board you have now, that isn't over three hundred bucks, would be this:

https://www.outletpc.com/de7484-asus-m5a99x-evo-r20-amd-990fx-amd-motherboard.html


And honestly I just don't think it's money well spent. Also, there a lot of things you get with a new platform besides just the improvement in CPU performance. You get MUCH faster DDR4 memory, you get PCIe 3.0 x16 graphics support instead of PCIe 2.0 support on the 990fx boards, you get super fast M.2 NVME SSD drive support, plus USB 3.1, much better audio and probably a few other features I can't think of off the top of my head right now.

No problem. If you decide you want to try your luck with a used board, I'll be happy to help you find one with a higher probability of being good and being a good model. I've had pretty good luck in the past with ebay purchases of used hardware, but graphics cards and motherboards can be especially problematic because sometimes the seller doesn't even know there is a problem.