Is this laptop overheating or just old tech?
Is this laptop overheating or just old tech?
Hi guys! First things first: here are the specs of my rig. My processor is an i7-9700K, and it runs from NZXT Kraken X72 to Asus ROG Strix Z390-F GAMING. The graphics card is a 2070 O8G from Asus ROG Strix RTX. I also have some RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB with 16GB (two 8GB sticks) running at 3000MHz on DDR4, stored in Samsung memory using the EVO Plus drive. My storage has a mix of hard drives and an NVMe M.2 card from Toshiba P300. One stick is 500GB while another holds 2TB spinning fast with a 64MB controller. I also got some cooling sticks from Corsair RM750x and an NZXT H series tower in Window Black.
I started feeling unstable when I pushed the CPU to 5GHz overclocking mode for gaming. So, before trying to fix it all over again, I updated my BIOS to the newest version and that reset everything. Now I'm really struggling to get back to the same speed I used before. I thought maybe my CPU just got weak from age or use, so I wanted to know if something is wrong with the processor itself.
Last time things worked great: Multiplier was 50, XMP turned on, AVX and MCE stayed automatic, LLC was set at 5, manual voltage at 1.385v, VCORE @ load at 1.350v, VCCIO at 1.250v, VCCSA at 1.150v. Back then it passed 8 hours of Realbench, 2 hours of Prime95, and 64MB of Intel Burn Test & OCCT Linpack NonAVX without any problems.
But now? It's hard to pass 2 hours of Realbench or even do 15 minutes of P95 tests. My temps have always been fine on the GPU side, hovering between 50 and 65 degrees under load during gaming, so I don't think that caused any damage. So what happened over those last 10 months? Or am I doing something wrong here?
Thanks a bunch in advance! Best regards
New BIOS versions can mess with overclocking. You need to reset the system back to stock and make sure your RAM isn't making errors. Once you are sure about the RAM, test it with aida64. When everything looks good at stock settings, then start overclocking the CPU. A new BIOS might force you to start all over again. That's why you should only update the BIOS if there is a real big problem. The problem with your old stress test was that you didn't check the RAM with memtest when you set it to its highest speed. Sometimes, as you raise the clock speeds, something in the memory controller gets upset. With my Ryzen setup, I adjusted the timings on the RAM and overclocked it to 3800 MHz. It looked fine at stock core frequencies. But once I turned on PBO EDC bug, the whole RAM overclock went unstable. So I reset to stock settings and ran memtest again. Every time I did memtest, I got random results. Different settings would sometimes pass or fail depending on what they were set to. What I learned was that I had left the Termination block and CAD_BUS block timings for the motherboard to auto-detect as they were exactly the same as the DRAM Calculator for Ryzen version 1.6.2. Sometimes when I turned on the PC, everything worked fine at first, but then the RAM would fail the test with errors. It took a lot of testing to find the right stable settings so that every time I boot my computer it stays safe. I could even get much tighter memory timings afterward. Now I can reach higher frequencies at very low vcore values. At first I thought I had ruined the memory controller or the cores, but it was just the settings from DRAM Calculator for Ryzen 1.6.2 that were wrong. The latest DRAM Calculator for Ryzen agrees with my fix now.
Unstable settings: Stable settings Issue appeared to be fixed by changing CAD_BUS ClkDrv from 24 to 40. This is power in one single setting.