7700k Running Very Hot Under Load

[DreddTrekkiter]

Hi all.

I recently put together a new build (specs at the end of post) for gaming, recording and editing (just like every other 17-year-old these days ). I had originally planned to put in an EVGA 1070 and use an EKWB A240G to cool the GPU and CPU. But the EKWB kit sold out and the GPU rose in price. So, I instead upgraded to a 1080 Ti and am using an H55 for the time being.

I intend to overclock the CPU when I can afford the water cooling system and my problems should then be permanently sorted. But, today, I decided to run MSI Afterburner and watch GPU and CPU temps while gaming (did a maybe 3 hour session on Minecraft). During a rather heated battle, no pun intended, I glanced over at my temps and saw that my CPU temp had maxed at 77 degrees C (the GPU wasn't a problem - that didn't rise about 60 degrees!). I'm generally not happy when my CPU temp goes over 75 degrees, so playing a rather undemanding game such as Minecraft and getting those temps spooked me.

So after I went into my bios and reduced the clock speed (was, at the time, running at 4.6GHz) down to stock speed (4.2GHz) and changed my fan curve so that my fan speed increased as soon as temps hit 70 degrees. I then decided to run some stress tests. I ran Geeks3D GPU Test and Prime95 at the same time while Real Temp GT and HEiNFO kept me posted on temps....

My GPU ended up hitting 87 degrees, and my CPU 91 degrees (that was core #4, #1 88C, #2 88C, #3 87C) after 4 minutes of running the benchmarks! As soon as I saw these, I stopped the tests and got on here to ask, why are my temps so high? Is this normal when both GPU and CPU are running at 100% for an amount of time?

Regarding the GPU, I do have the power limit maxed out, and so the temp limit which (when not under load) gives me more FPS than when not maxed. And could it be that until I'm able to afford my custom water loop, I should get a better AIO cooler for my CPU?

Sorry for the massive post, and many thanks.

Specs:

i7-7700k @ 4.2GHz
MSI Z270 Gaming M7 Mobo
Gigabyte Aorus GTX 1080 Ti
G.Skill TridentZ 16GB Memory @ 1666MHz 15-16-16 (haven't yet figured out how to enable XMP - until I opened HWiNFO64 I was happy thinking my RAM was running 3333MHz)
Corsair H55 (fastened to the top of the case)
Corsair CS650M
Corsair 570X (w/ 3 SP120 RGB intake fans on the front, and 1 outflow on the back)
Samsung 850 Evo 500GB
Seagate 2TB HDD

 

[Charl15]

When your cpu was OC'ed to 4.6Ghz was the core voltage set to auto or did you manually set the voltage. The 7700K when OC'ed that far does tend to run hot especially when stressing it using programs like Prime 95.

You could start with the basics like re seating the CPU cooler and applying new thermal paste.
You could also try adding a 2nd 120mm fan to the H55 cooler to run it in a push/pull config.

Regarding the GPU, I am not sure what the issue could be. Is the gpu manually OC'ed or did you just up the power limiter and let GPU Boost 3.0 take over?

A side note on the ram is Double Data Rate or DDR which means actual speed is 1666 but effective is 3333 as sold at.
Your ram is running correctly

 

[DreddTrekkiter]

When your cpu was OC'ed to 4.6Ghz was the core voltage set to auto or did you manually set the voltage. The 7700K when OC'ed that far does tend to run hot especially when stressing it using programs like Prime 95.

You could start with the basics like re seating the CPU cooler and applying new thermal paste.
You could also try adding a 2nd 120mm fan to the H55 cooler to run it in a push/pull config.

Regarding the GPU, I am not sure what the issue could be. Is the gpu manually OC'ed or did you just up the power limiter and let GPU Boost 3.0 take over?

A side note on the ram is Double Data Rate or DDR which means actual speed is 1666 but effective is 3333 as sold at.
Your ram is running correctly

I completely forgot about the DDR aspect of the RAM, thanks for the reminder.

I didn't change the voltage at all when OCing the CPU...if memory serves, at stock the voltage was 1.25v. I tried it at 4.6GHz, not even touching the voltage and it ran seemingly perfectly fine so I left the voltage alone.

But surely 4.6 isn't considered a large overclock? I, in all my epic inexperience, consider 4.8-5.0+ to be a large OC....? I think I'll reapply thermal paste after lunch...it's always possible I put it on too generously...

3 days ago, I did try and overclock my GPU using MSI Afterburner, following JayzTwoCents beginner tutorial to GPU overclocking. I ran Afterburner, put my power limit (and so temp limit) straight up, just like Jay said (although I wasn't able to select priority for temp or limit) and then had a go slowly upping clock speed and voltage. I was never able to get a stable run through of Unigine Valley when I'd pushed voltage, B-Clock and Ram Clock up, so I decided to leave the GPU at stock, just with the limit maxed. (To be fair, with the power limit maxed, the B-Clock is around 1900MHz at stock speed) And I've no idea what GPU Boost is...maybe I should go ask Google...

 

[Charl15]

When your cpu was OC'ed to 4.6Ghz was the core voltage set to auto or did you manually set the voltage. The 7700K when OC'ed that far does tend to run hot especially when stressing it using programs like Prime 95.

You could start with the basics like re seating the CPU cooler and applying new thermal paste.
You could also try adding a 2nd 120mm fan to the H55 cooler to run it in a push/pull config.

Regarding the GPU, I am not sure what the issue could be. Is the gpu manually OC'ed or did you just up the power limiter and let GPU Boost 3.0 take over?

A side note on the ram is Double Data Rate or DDR which means actual speed is 1666 but effective is 3333 as sold at.
Your ram is running correctly

I completely forgot about the DDR aspect of the RAM, thanks for the reminder.

I didn't change the voltage at all when OCing the CPU...if memory serves, at stock the voltage was 1.25v. I tried it at 4.6GHz, not even touching the voltage and it ran seemingly perfectly fine so I left the voltage alone.

But surely 4.6 isn't considered a large overclock? I, in all my epic inexperience, consider 4.8-5.0+ to be a large OC....? I think I'll reapply thermal paste after lunch...it's always possible I put it on too generously...

3 days ago, I did try and overclock my GPU using MSI Afterburner, following JayzTwoCents beginner tutorial to GPU overclocking. I ran Afterburner, put my power limit (and so temp limit) straight up, just like Jay said (although I wasn't able to select priority for temp or limit) and then had a go slowly upping clock speed and voltage. I was never able to get a stable run through of Unigine Valley when I'd pushed voltage, B-Clock and Ram Clock up, so I decided to leave the GPU at stock, just with the limit maxed. (To be fair, with the power limit maxed, the B-Clock is around 1900MHz at stock speed) And I've no idea what GPU Boost is...maybe I should go ask Google...

4.6Ghz is not really a big overclock for a chip that can turboboost to 4.5Ghz on selected cores. Just make sure that the voltage remains at 1.275 if that's what you set it at. On some motherboards the default bios would adjust the voltage according to the load that the CPU is under. In most case it would supply more volts than what is actually needed. So that might cause the CPU to run hotter than it should. If all of these things are correct if might just be that the 120mm radiator of the h55 cooler is simply not big enough for that cpu.

On the GPU side of things with Pascal all 1080ti's perform extremely similar in games and in overclocking results. The best thing you could do if you don't want to manually overclock is to raise the power limit to 120% and adjust the fan curve a bit higher to keep to card cooler.

 

[DreddTrekkiter]

Okay, so I spent yesterday afternoon cleaning off and reapplying thermal paste. Here are some pictures of how much paste was on before...I assume this was too much?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzTqD3pSvcwsb2NvR2xiaHJmdDQ/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzTqD3pSvcwsNWt1QWZUOGNtc1E/view?usp=sharing

And then here are the UEFI settings for my CPU...looks as if voltage is actually 1.142v?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzTqD3pSvcwsTmw3cGRrQVZLUTQ/view?usp=sharing

 

[Charl15]

Okay, so I spent yesterday afternoon cleaning off and reapplying thermal paste. Here are some pictures of how much paste was on before...I assume this was too much?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzTqD3pSvcwsb2NvR2xiaHJmdDQ/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzTqD3pSvcwsNWt1QWZUOGNtc1E/view?usp=sharing

And then here are the UEFI settings for my CPU...looks as if voltage is actually 1.142v?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzTqD3pSvcwsTmw3cGRrQVZLUTQ/view?usp=sharing

Its difficult to say how much is to much. It looks like the paste was forced out to the sides of the heatspreader leaving the middle section where the actual CPU core sits a little thin on paste. The most common method for applying heatpaste is probably the pea method. Just make sure that you don't over tighten the screws holding down the CPU block that might be why most of the paste was forced out to the sides of the heatspreader.

 

[Charl15]

After you reapplied thermal paste what did the temps look like?

 

[DreddTrekkiter]

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzTqD3pSvcwscEZyRXlkNDUtUnM

Cores #1 and #3 are looking alright, but #2 and #4 are a little worrying. This is running 4 tabs on Chrome, watching a stream of my mate's, two Excel sheets, notepad, and Prime95 with Real Temp.

 

[blockhead78]

don't expect all cores to be the same, they will fluctuate regularly

TBH, with that cooler... those recent under load temps seem about right

 

[Charl15]

don't expect all cores to be the same, they will fluctuate regularly

TBH, with that cooler... those recent under load temps seem about right

I agree with your opinion. Something that might help on a temporary basis is to add a 2nd 120mm fan to the cooler, but ultimately you should go with a bigger AIC or do a custom loop if you want to overclock and still keeps temps and noise down.

 

[Lucky_SLS]

the 7700k has a nasty habit of taking upto 1.4v while turbo boosting and hence u may see some spikes. check if thats the case. u can have an offset voltage to limit it at 1.35v?

 

[DreddTrekkiter]

Okay, so I've decided that I shall buy a Corsair H100i GTX when I next get paid. I've found excellent reviews for keeping temps down with that and it's fairly cheap until I can afford to go begging to EKWB. Until then, to stop voltage fluctuating worryingly under the motherboard's auto setting, I have set the VCore manually to 1.325v and underclocked to 3.6GHz because I'm a wuss and don't like seeing high temps. What do we think about this? Cheers

 

[Lucky_SLS]

Okay, so I've decided that I shall buy a Corsair H100i GTX when I next get paid. I've found excellent reviews for keeping temps down with that and it's fairly cheap until I can afford to go begging to EKWB. Until then, to stop voltage fluctuating worryingly under the motherboard's auto setting, I have set the VCore manually to 1.325v and underclocked to 3.6GHz because I'm a wuss and don't like seeing high temps. What do we think about this? Cheers

Sry for the late reply,
1.325v is high. I said that it should not take more than 1.35v for turbo boosting. That's y I told an offset limit to 1.35v. U can have stable stock speeds as low as 1.2v I think.