Motherboard VR Thermal Throttling
Motherboard VR Thermal Throttling
Hi guys,
I’m using an Intel i7 8700k on an ASUS Z370-E Gaming motherboard with 32GB G.Skill memory (F4-3200C14D-32GTZR). My CPU has a CoolerMaster MasterLiquid 240 pro AIO cooler. I enabled the XMP profile to make my RAM run at 3200Mhz. At first everything worked fine and games ran smoothly. Recently, while playing Hitman, I encountered a BSOD. I performed a Prime95 blend test which failed after about five minutes. I thought the issue might be with the RAM and checked my VCCIO and VCCSA voltages—1.3V for VCCIO and 1.2V for VCCSA. The DRAM voltage was set to 1.35V by XMP. I adjusted the VCCIO down to 1.25V (believing 1.3V was too high) and gradually increased VCCSA until the blend test stopped failing, lasting two hours. I also set the CPU multiplier to 47 across all cores. After running a Prime95 small FFT test in Intel Extreme Tuning Utility, I noticed "Motherboard VR Thermal Throttling" and my CPU frequency dropped to 4.5Ghz or lower. I’m trying to figure out why the VRM gets so hot and how to fix it.
I resolved the issue. The AC/DC load line was configured automatically. Both were adjusted to 0.01 with no further throttling due to hot VRM.