Are you checking your temperature?
Are you checking your temperature?
A little more than a week ago I decided to go over the clock speed of my i7 9700k. After testing several different settings, I settled on boosting all cores to run at 4.9 GHz. When I did a stress test, the total temperature hit about 85C, which isn't super ideal but isn't bad either. Everything seems stable and games like American Truck Simulator still work great. But even when playing light games like that truck sim while using only 15% to 25% power, temperatures on one or two cores jumped up to around 53C. In more demanding games like Planet Coaster, I've seen core temps go up to 70C during heavy loads, pushing the CPU's usage along with its clock speed to about 65% to 75%. I know for a fact that these temperatures aren't dangerous to my CPU at all. Since I can't lower the voltage because of this new clock speed and I'm still seeing 50C even at low power usage, should I rethink using this specific voltage and clock speed? My computer is an i7 9700K running at 4900 MHz on an ASUS Z390 motherboard with a gaming wifi card. It has the dark rock pro 4 cooler paired with an evga RTX 2080 ti xc2 graphics card, which uses 16 GB of ram running at 2666 MHz and 1.32 volts on 'manual mode'.
I have been trying harder to run stress tests to find out how hot my computer gets. I ran several checks from OCCT (without AVX and small FFTs) for 15 minutes, Prime95 (also without AVX and small FFTs) for 15 minutes, and a stress test called RealBench. After all these tests done in quick succession, here are my recorded temperatures: If you need to know them. HWINFO gave the same results as OCCT. The way OCCT shows things was much easier than I expected. It let me see everything at once. I never went higher than 86 degrees C, but I am still worried about leaving it that hot. RealBench got me into the high 80s often when not doing normal stress games stayed around a steady 75 degrees. However, this wasn't always true pressure on my graphics card. My voltage was between 1.29 and 1.30 volts. But I'm not sure how accurate that measurement really is. Maybe my next step is running a 4-hour test, but I don't think it will magically lower my heat levels. I am mostly worried about stability right now. The question is: since I don't want to change my cooling setup, is it smart to leave the overclocking like this? Even though it doesn't matter much at the moment, I still have no GPU overclocked yet. This might be something to tackle later on.