How bad did I lose the Silicon Lotto?

WAterTriAd

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Trying to tame my i9 12900k but I can't get it stable under 1.34 vcore in cinebench R23. Went through three coolers (started with Scythe Fuma 2, then an AIO Artic II 280 and now the 360) and just finally got it to stop thermal throttling.

The Asus mobo keeps trying to auto set the voltage to 1.42 vcore to run stock clocks which causes it to thermal throttle like crazy (and has made me hate this mobo) even on the Artic II 360. While my case isn't the greatest for airflow as it's a Fractal Meshify C (solid panel with a hole cut in it to feed the video card with cold air) so it's not terrible either.

In order to keep the motherboard from ramping up the voltage I was forced to turn on Intel Fail Safes otherwise the auto overclocking just pushes the vcore back to 1.42 anyway...

I keep seeing people posting 1.15-1.25 vcore specs but if I try that it locks up just loading cinebench (before I even hit test).

Are there settings I'm missing that make the CPU this hot/unstable or did I just lose the silicon lotto?

CPU: Intel 12900K
Heatsink: AIO Artic II 360
Mobo: Asus Strix Z690-A Gaming Wifi D4
Memory: G-Skill Ripjaw V series 3200 Timing 14-14-14-34
Video: Gigabyte 6900XT
Storage: Samsung M.2 980 Pro
PSU: Seasonic Gold Plus 850
Case: Fractal Meshify C
 
bios up to date? product page says it has flashback so maybe use that to bypass any cpu issues while flashing.
 
That's fascinating, they dropped a new bios for the board a couple days ago but it actually set the core voltage to 1.25 by default now so that's improved from where it was. It's back to thermal throttling but only because it's actually applying the very minor overclock I set... (pretty sure the intel fail safe was preventing this previously).

So thanks, as it did fix part of the issue. I'll play with this for a while and see where I can get it. The system should be capable of running much cooler than it currently is.
 
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That lasted exactly one run then after booting into the BIOS a second time the Mobo was back to putting 1.4 volts into the chip again...

Edited the previous message as the Intel Safe option is in SVID which I skipped the first time I setup the BIOS after the update as I thought it was in an earlier field...
Setting SVID to best did improve things a little though as setting the Core Voltage to 1.34 and then setting the per core adaptive offset to .075 gets me a HWInfo PCore VID of 1.03 but it's still hitting 88 degrees on core 4 (which has always been my hottest on all three coolers so I don't think it's a seating problem). The rest are still hitting 80'ish.

Any other advice would be appreciated.
 
Does your mobo have options to adjust the voltage along the entire boost curve? Likewise, overclocking each core differently, rather than the same clocks on all cores?

This sort of approach seems to work better for these CPUs.
 
does the aio cover the whole chip? also that ^^ keep tweaking the voltage
 
Yeah, I can change voltage per core and I'm using adaptive and "-" modifer with .075 on each P Core right now with the vcore at 1.34. Setting the vcore lower makes the chip unstable but it doesn't seem to care about the adaptive on the performance cores being at -.075 so it's probably an e core issue.

Also I'm pretty sure the AIO covers the whole chip, the Scythe Fuma 2 did (based on the way the thermal paste spread) and this has roughly the same size plate.

I'm probably going to play with voltage per boost segment next or drop the VCore back to 1.25 but set the e cores at 1.34 and see if that lets me play with the PCores some more. (No luck here.)

I'd like to see at least 5ghz out of those when all 8 are running as that's a barrier I keep hitting on previous chips (my 2600k hit 4.8 on air and my 6700K was a waste of money as it only hit 4.9 on water). But, the 6700k started flaking out even at stock speeds so I have this one now.
 
Well damn. guess I'll be redoing the thermal paste this weekend:
https://support.arctic.de/lf2-lga1700

"A selection of motherboards interferes with the PCB cover of the water pump. This can be remedied by removing the PCB cover. For this, only two screws have to be loosened and the cover can be easily removed. The function and safety of the Liquid Freezer II is not affected."

My Mobo is on that list...
 
Removing the PCB lid from the AIO dropped my temps by 6'ish degrees on that core... So, yes, the AIO covers the whole chip, but no it wasn't making full contact with the chip because a pair of capacitors on the mobo are too tall for this water block so they lift up one corner just slightly (you can see the glob of thermal paste there).

Mind you the paste was still wet so I didn't reapply as I now need to wait for the new lid for the PCB that fixes this problem to come in so I'll probably see another 2-3 degree drop when I do that. Aside from that corner the spread looked good.
 
Well damn. guess I'll be redoing the thermal paste this weekend:
https://support.arctic.de/lf2-lga1700

"A selection of motherboards interferes with the PCB cover of the water pump. This can be remedied by removing the PCB cover. For this, only two screws have to be loosened and the cover can be easily removed. The function and safety of the Liquid Freezer II is not affected."

My Mobo is on that list...
nice find!
 
Seems like with Alder Lake and Ryzen 5k, overclocking is now quite difficult.
I actually disagree with this statement.It is very easy to overclock these CPU's from Intel and AMD these days with a little understanding and some trial and error testing.
EG OC: I only play PC Games,so these are examples I can give. Weather running at default clock or overclocked the FPS in games are the same

Shadow of the Tomb Raider AMD 5800X up to 5150Mhz​



God of War 12900K 5400Mhz​


And arguably not worth the hassle.
I also agree 100% with this.Intel and AMD have there CPU's dialed in now,where overclocking the CPU's not worth the hassle.
Of course you will still have people who will defend the overclock and prove it to you that buying the best CPU,the best GPU,the best motherboard,the best ram and playing PC games at at 720p on the lowest setting . #clownWorld

@OP the 12900K are hot CPU but can be tamed even on Air. Fix your errors and faults of any equipment.My suggesting stop testing Cinebench (unless your a 3D artist who uses the engine Cinema 4D) test the CPU in real life situations such as PC Gaming,video editing etc just my 2 cents. Also I would not really worry about a couple of degrees between CPU paste,that is just me though.My first 12900K I used 10+year old MX4 artic stuff and it worked fine.
 
Call me old school. I put many hours in to dialing in a overclock when the performance gain was massive and mattered. Honestly software does 95% of that now. Yes I miss the days like when The P3 was new, or the c2D era, or the Athlon XP 2500+ Barton core days. But these days it’s almost set it and forget it if your time is worth money.
 
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So, an update and a response to some comments.

The update:
Arctic replied to my support request that they will reply to my support request likely sometime in the next 9 (7 from posting) days. This is in request to getting the new backplate that's compatible with Asus motherboards so I'm waiting on an actual response instead of the auto reply email. Until then I am running the cooler naked (with the PCB exposed) but at least that's brought the temps into the 70's with the occasional flick into the 80's on Cinebench R23 and keeps in in the high 70's for Warhammer 3 Total War.

The response:
60-75 degrees is what I consider acceptable for a desktop CPU's at load so it doesn't cook me during the summer as while I have good AC, that only really works to 72 degrees and my thermostat is down stairs so my den can easily get 10-20 degrees hotter than the rest of the house when I'm running my gaming rig. Using AIDA64/Cinebench/Intel Burn Test to hit those high heat numbers lets me see where the worst case scenario is and tune the machine to where I want it from that.

At this point, I wouldn't recommend my Asus motherboard, and I wouldn't recommend the Intel 12900k to anyone I know for a new rig. They are just too hard and too hot to get a good hold of, and that after days of tuning I was able to finally get the mid 27k score that the 12900k should produce only after fighting Asus for control over the core voltage as it has SOOOO many ways that it can tweak your CPU for you and most of them are bad. Like really bad. On Asus' recommended settings after the first run, I was seeing 24k in cinebench because it overvolted so badly on default clocks that it couldn't keep the temps down. Worse, it hit 1.45 volts for standard clocks because it was correcting heat instabilities with more voltage....

So yeah, that needed shut down and spending days trying to find the options to do that was absurd.

These chips are hard to overclock because of a combination of terrible AI on the mobo's and absurd defaults from Intel. I don't mind AI fan curves, but all the AI voltage stuff on a chip that's already using it's own strange boost methods was just too much. With only one or the other these would be fine, but getting both at the same time meant an unpleasant experience.
 
60-75 degrees is what I consider acceptable for a desktop CPU's at load so it doesn't cook me during the summer as while I have good AC, that only really works to 72 degrees and my thermostat is down stairs so my den can easily get 10-20 degrees hotter than the rest of the house when I'm running my gaming rig
Does the temp of the part itself really matter for overall room temp? It's still the same amount of energy being dispersed into the room air.

Unless you sit where warm air is directly blowing on you, or maybe I'm just wrong lol.
 
Does the temp of the part itself really matter for overall room temp? It's still the same amount of energy being dispersed into the room air.

Unless you sit where warm air is directly blowing on you, or maybe I'm just wrong lol.
I think he was trying to infer that when it gets warmer he wouldn't have enough headroom. He's wrong, but that's what I think he was getting at.
 
Manual overclocking stopped being worth it 3 generations ago IMO. Let the CPU boost do its thing and spend the effort on something that matters.
 
Are you actually playing your games at 1080p? If so, it makes sense, I guess.
 
Update: Arctic did finally get back to me, apparently there has been more interest than they were expecting so they got deluged in requests. They've told me they still need to manufacture the new covers and will send me one as soon as they do. They also said in the meantime I can run it without the cover (which I have been and it's doing fine).

bigddybn Sure, if you want to believe that then have fun with stupidly high voltages, lower life expectancy for your parts, and higher temps for a small clock boost.
Mchart I game at 1440p currently, will move up to 4k once I find a monitor I actually like. Currently hate my 1440p as it does stupid thing when you swap to variable refresh (colors wash out). It's a Samsung LC32HG70QQ that was supposed to be very good in 2018 but, it's "meh" at best.
 
Update: Arctic did finally get back to me, apparently there has been more interest than they were expecting so they got deluged in requests. They've told me they still need to manufacture the new covers and will send me one as soon as they do. They also said in the meantime I can run it without the cover (which I have been and it's doing fine).

bigddybn Sure, if you want to believe that then have fun with stupidly high voltages, lower life expectancy for your parts, and higher temps for a small clock boost.
Mchart I game at 1440p currently, will move up to 4k once I find a monitor I actually like. Currently hate my 1440p as it does stupid thing when you swap to variable refresh (colors wash out). It's a Samsung LC32HG70QQ that was supposed to be very good in 2018 but, it's "meh" at best.
Your statement makes no sense. Let the factory boost do its thing and stop playing with gimmicky motherboard "auto overlocking." It's better at it than you are. It's better at it than Asus is too apparently. But hey, keep on "tuning" and "having fun with stupidly high voltages" if it entertains you.

As for the life expectancy of my parts, I'll "believe" the Intel engineering team over a random forum poster with some broken BIOS switches. Thanks.
 
Your statement makes no sense. Let the factory boost do its thing and stop playing with gimmicky motherboard "auto overlocking." It's better at it than you are. It's better at it than Asus is too apparently. But hey, keep on "tuning" and "having fun with stupidly high voltages" if it entertains you.

As for the life expectancy of my parts, I'll "believe" the Intel engineering team over a random forum poster with some broken BIOS switches. Thanks.
Dude is a nutbar,it is a inanimate object that has no meaning at all. Always believe the Intel/AMD engineers over the dummies on the forums,worst forum maybe the overclock.net ASUS dummies who think faster ram at 720p is the greatest.It is amazing how brainwashed people are with everything.
 
Your statement makes no sense. Let the factory boost do its thing and stop playing with gimmicky motherboard "auto overlocking." It's better at it than you are. It's better at it than Asus is too apparently. But hey, keep on "tuning" and "having fun with stupidly high voltages" if it entertains you.

As for the life expectancy of my parts, I'll "believe" the Intel engineering team over a random forum poster with some broken BIOS switches. Thanks.
I can't speak for Intel, but I get better temps along with better numbers manually setting my 5600x to 46 @ 1.2 volts compared to using PBO. I'm a good 10-15c cooler.
 
I can't speak for Intel, but I get better temps along with better numbers manually setting my 5600x to 46 @ 1.2 volts compared to using PBO. I'm a good 10-15c cooler.

Ignore the trolls, I'm hitting significantly better temps after undervolting while getting full "factory" performance on the chip with no apparent stability issues. Hitting ~27,600 for the last five or six times I've tested and my temps are staying below 80 even after running it hard in gaming for hours. So, for this build, I consider it a success. My last response was just letting people know that Arctic Freezer II AIO's will be getting the corrected backplate to fit Asus motherboards and that I did manage to get an underclock to work but it took significant effort.

As I have some headroom, I may attempt a manual overclock but I'll wait for the backplate to come in for that as I need to redo the thermal paste and that might change my results.

Also, the entire point of this thread was to find out if other 12900k owners were having issues taming the heat on Asus motherboards as well or if I just did poorly on the silicon lotto. While that hasn't been the primary topic, I do appreciate the help people offered as I was able to fix my issues so thanks to the people actually trying to help.
 
Ignore the trolls, I'm hitting significantly better temps after undervolting while getting full "factory" performance on the chip with no apparent stability issues. Hitting ~27,600 for the last five or six times I've tested and my temps are staying below 80 even after running it hard in gaming for hours. So, for this build, I consider it a success. My last response was just letting people know that Arctic Freezer II AIO's will be getting the corrected backplate to fit Asus motherboards and that I did manage to get an underclock to work but it took significant effort.

As I have some headroom, I may attempt a manual overclock but I'll wait for the backplate to come in for that as I need to redo the thermal paste and that might change my results.

Also, the entire point of this thread was to find out if other 12900k owners were having issues taming the heat on Asus motherboards as well or if I just did poorly on the silicon lotto. While that hasn't been the primary topic, I do appreciate the help people offered as I was able to fix my issues so thanks to the people actually trying to help.

Before I sold my 12900k, I would very rarely go over 80C with a EK AIO 360 on the same motherboard at stock boost speeds, power limits removed. I didn't have any issues fitting it on the board though like it sounds like you were having with the AFII. I didn't touch the Vcore in bios, but IIRC it was in the 1.275-1.3 range under a full core load using the default Asus bios settings (Auto most likely).

I have been using a 12600k in the same motherboard for the last few days and it rarely goes over 70C with a 600Mhz OC all core. That's a much cooler CPU for me.
 
normal game temps are fine but any thing hits the CPU hard , Prime, encoding, cinabench CPU spikes to over 90c and sits there. also some other stuff i have would cause spikes to 80 for for few sec. CPU seems to stay cool for the most part but it can make a lot of heat faster then cooler can do any thing about it i think
 
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