At 100°C the temperature is 9900K
At 100°C the temperature is 9900K
I've owned this system for a few years now. Previously, it faced temperature issues and throttling, which was resolved by adjusting the PLL settings to around 115W. I stopped doing that some time ago. Recently, after cleaning the PC thoroughly with compressed air, I decided to run Cinebench for the first time. The test showed temperatures reaching nearly 100°C within seconds. My friends advised me to shut it down quickly, but I was told to reapply thermal paste and reset BIOS and XMP settings. This has caused confusion because some say that if Cinebench throttles, cooling isn’t sufficient. Others claim the numbers don’t match real-world performance and aren’t representative of typical use. I’m unsure what to do and feel a bit overwhelmed by all this technical talk. My idle temps are around 38°C, which is average for gaming, but during intense sessions it can spike to about 80°C—similar to what I saw on my 9900K during games like Battlefield or Red Dead Redemption 2. Should I be concerned? Is the VCore setting too high? Should I reapply thermal paste? I’ve never overclocked before and only experimented with voltage settings.
For you, keeping the CPU at normal temperatures matches your tasks, so there’s no need to worry. If you’re worried, you can adjust the voltage slightly lower using the negative voltage offset in your BIOS.
your vcore value is significantly too high at 1.43. It seems you might have enabled auto tuning. Try setting it to 1.28v and observe the results. My 9900KS runs at 5.0 ghz with no AVX or 4.7 cache, idle around 37°C and mid-60s under load. For comparison, I used an H115i and achieved similar performance.
No one is wrong here. The default settings often seem too extreme. Intel aimed to make the 9900k run smoothly under all conditions, so they created a very high VID table. You didn’t do anything wrong. Your motherboard works fine. In fact, the Asus Z390 series performs well. Check your BIOS and tweak the VCore to 1.3 manually. Run OCCT with a big data file for an hour. If it stays stable, gradually lower the VCore by 0.1 until you reach around 1.2v. If you hit that level, temperatures should stay below 100°C—usually in the mid-70s.