13700K, big dual tower air cooler installed two weekends ago, fresh paste. Idle is 33-35C which seems fine, but 30 seconds into a multicore render it's at 95C and staying there. Gaming sits around 70C so it's not unusable, I just don't know whether I mounted something badly or this is what this chip does. Case has three intake and two exhaust fans.
One thing worth doing anyway on that socket: a contact frame. The stock LGA1700 retention mechanism bends the IHS very slightly concave and people routinely see 5-8C from swapping it for a flat frame. It's a 15 minute job and about the price of a tube of paste.
Seconding, but do it when you're already taking the cooler off for something else. It's not worth repasting purely for it unless you're chasing the last few degrees.
Check that the cooler's fans and your case exhaust are pointed the same way. I've now seen three builds where the tower cooler was rotated 90 degrees so it blew into the side panel. Everything looks tidy, temps are terrible under load and fine at idle.
Also worth knowing which stress test you ran. A small FFT prime run or a heavy AVX benchmark is a much harder load than anything you'll do in real life, and treating that number as your normal operating temperature will just make you miserable. Render for ten minutes and look at that instead.
95C is going to kill that chip within a year, you need a 360mm AIO minimum for a 13700K.
The chip throttles itself at 100C precisely so that doesn't happen. A 360 would let it draw more power and it would still land at 95C, just louder.
@airflow_amir · 7mo ago · 3 replies
Nothing is wrong. A 13700K under an all-core load will run to its thermal limit and then hold there by dropping clocks, and that limit is 100C. Hitting 95 and parking is the design working, not the cooler failing.
The number that tells you whether your mount is good is not the peak temperature, it's the sustained power. Watch package power in HWiNFO during the render. A good air cooler in a decent case will hold something like 200-230W at 95C. If you're pinned at 95C while only pulling 130W, then yes, something is wrong with the contact.
The idle of 34C already suggests the mount is fine, by the way. A badly seated cooler usually shows up as a high idle too.
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@immersion_ivy · 7mo ago
212W sustained. So the cooler is doing its job and I've been worrying about the wrong number for two weeks.
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@airflow_amir · 7mo ago
That's a healthy mount. If the noise bothers you, cap the long duration power limit at 180W. You lose maybe 4-6% in renders and drop 10C, and games won't change at all because they never got near that ceiling.
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