Seeking guidance on setting up the i9-13900K with an ASUS Z790 Hero.
Seeking guidance on setting up the i9-13900K with an ASUS Z790 Hero.
Hey there, looking for some tips to keep your 13900ks from reaching high temps. You want to avoid the 90s in benchmarks and keep your 64GB DDR5 at its XMP speed of 6400mhz, especially since some controllers seem to struggle. Your rig uses a custom liquid loop with two 460mm RADs from EK, estimated to dissipate around 750W and includes a full block 3080TI. The CPU is the Velocity 2 from EK, and idle temps are usually around 30-35°C—though it’s been a bit hot in your room lately. Based on past issues, sudden temperature spikes often point to poor cooling or inadequate thermal paste, not the CPU itself. The water block looks solid, and triple-checking the paste should be enough. When temps hit 90-100°C in Cinebench, the RADs are working hard. You mentioned disabling Intel’s multi-core boost but still seeing high power draw—320W at 1.45V. You have a few options: tweak BIOS settings to cap CPU power, or consider undervolting. Either way, be careful under full load to avoid instability. What do you think?
The temperatures rise suddenly? It seems the IHS and CPU retention frame design might require an aftermarket solution. A product like this from Thermal Grizzly or another manufacturer could help.
The temperature doesn't jump instantly to 100°C; it gradually reaches it after a few seconds. Usually only the cores hitting 6GHz are at that level, while the rest stay around 97°C. I've adjusted the BIOS settings—I turned off the "Unlimited ICC..." option, which lets the CPU draw as much current as needed (ASUS sets it to 500A). I also fixed the P1 and P2 states to a max draw of 280W. This setup seems ideal for my CPU: it lets two cores reach 6GHz, the others at 5.6GHz, keeping temps near 85-89°C. Since I'm limiting total power, the full voltage of the CPU core has dropped from 1.45V to 1.4V. When I ran Cinebench, I only saw about a 300-point drop, which is a good balance for cutting power by roughly 40W.
It's quite unusual to have this feature turned on by default, especially with the XOC board—cooling would need to be sufficient. This improvement is noticeable compared to before, and using an undervolt could further reduce heat, though it might risk instability if set too low.
So i was playing around with the ASUS AI Overclock, there seems to be a nasty bug in BIOS version 0813 on the ASUS z790 Hero. I reviewed the settings for what they AI was going to run the CPU at and it looked promising. 4 cores at 6.2ghz and the other 4 at 5.9ghz and the E-cores untouched. It was aiming for a Vcore of ~1.42v on all the cores with an Adaptive cap of 1.46v. However once in Windows I noticed that on a partial load all the cores had a voltage of 1.53v, idle was ~1.2v and Full load was 1.28 - 1.38v, some decent Vdroop there. (If only the P-Cores where loaded the vCores settle around 1.45v) I also noticed that while the core temps where staying below the 90c package threshold under full load and it TDP was targeting ~280W it had overridden the Unlimited ICCMAX setting to set the CPU current to 511.2A which seems completely unnecessary.
It’s mostly resolved. My CPU maintains the same performance at 280W as it does at the standard 320W setting. It looks like the z790 Hero tends to push everything to its limit by default, being too lenient with current and voltage which led to a significant temperature rise. Likely because it’s mainly an overclocking board. When I entered the BIOS and adjusted nearly every parameter, I reached a peak temperature of around 94°C during Cinebench with four cores at 6.2GHz and the other four at 6GHz, all while staying within a 280W power limit. Cinebench is a simulated task, so your CPU wouldn’t be under constant stress in real-world use. During games it stays around 50°C, and with Handbrake encoding it reaches about 75°C.
Great job, that looks significantly improved. Everything seems to be working well with my AIO now.
Just finished adding a contact frame. Still debating if it was worth the hassle. My SP is 110. Oddly enough, I also have core 5 and 7 issues—they hit 100c while others stay near 90c. I'm still adjusting the CPU settings. Edit: The board re-evaluated and now it's at 128.