Issues with temperature control at 7800x3d.
Issues with temperature control at 7800x3d.
I just received a 7800x3d today and everything seemed normal after booting into BIOS with temperatures between 35-40°C. After installing Windows, fans started spinning quickly—initially I thought it would hit around 60% based on the noise. Once L-Connect3 loaded, both the CPU and GPU temps stayed around 60-70°C while idle. The system matched my motherboard’s fan curve and ran at 80%. I looked up forums and decided to follow my previous steps. I’ve been running it intermittently for nearly six hours, doing everything I knew—swapping coolant, applying new thermal paste, checking pumps and fans. Despite all that, nothing changed. I tried playing games to test, and was surprised to see idle temps stayed similar under load (BF2042 - 1440p Ultra). I found a way by adjusting my power plan and setting the processor max state to 99%. I’ll share some images below to show the impact of that setting. At 99% it averaged 40-43°C at 4.0Ghz and 65-70°C at 4.6Ghz. I’m curious if pushing the processor to 99% affects game performance. Thanks for watching!
Your display image indicates you were using it in the 1940s while idle—that's typical. If launching programs causes spikes, adjusting fan curves should help. You probably need to undo any recent power plan tweaks; they're usually unnecessary. Many users have overly aggressive curves for their needs. Skip HWMonitor—it tends to give inaccurate readings and we don't suggest it. The go-to tool is HWiNFO64. Running at 7800x3D, air cooling with an Assassin IV at just 30% PWM most of the time, it stays completely silent, even during intense gameplay.
3D v-cache causes overheating despite direct die cooling. This stems from adding extra heat transfer layers on top of the chip, known as the 3D v-cache. Remove HWmonitor and switch to HWinfo64 for better accuracy with Ryzen processors. Running Cinebench R23 will typically yield around 18k per core during a single run. Use the balanced Power Plan; high performance mode can lead to sustained boost clock errors. Direct die cooling helps somewhat, but it’s not sufficient long-term. Only the 7950x3D sees notable gains due to its higher max boost clock (+200MHz). In short, the 3D v-cache imposes a thermal constraint that lowers Zen4’s maximum boost to roughly 700MHz lower than expected. The trade-off is gaining about 64MB of L3 cache versus a significant speed increase. Lower clock speeds also cut power use, with the 7950x outperforming the 7950x3D by an additional 100W. Overall, the 7800x3D matches CCD0 performance when IHS are excluded.