Solved CPU thermal throttle issue on my i5 6600k.

Bruce · Oct 21, 2020

while the stock fan and heatsink are usually more than adequate, it looks like they aren't for you.
has this only just started happening?

new paste is a good start but I'd also be gone one step further and getting a good heatsink with large fan for airflow and checking the chassis fans.

how much dust has built up around the fan blades and air vents?

what software are you using to test the temps?
get a second option from another program to double check.

freestyler24 · Oct 21, 2020

Bruce said:
while the stock fan and heatsink are usually more than adequate, it looks like they aren't for you.
has this only just started happening?

new paste is a good start but I'd also be gone one step further and getting a good heatsink with large fan for airflow and checking the chassis fans.

how much dust has built up around the fan blades and air vents?

what software are you using to test the temps?
get a second option from another program to double check.

"while the stock fan and heatsink are usually more than adequate, it looks like they aren't for you.
has this only just started happening?"

I am not sure about how long it was going on for. As I don't usually check my pc stats. Only recently when I upgraded my RAM and was checking its performance is when I noticed the CPU throttling. I never faced and stutters or screen tearing or pc shut downs till date. Only reason for me to upgrade my RAM was to improve my FPS but later I understood that my GPU was a overkill for my CPU, which is holding my GPU from its full potential.

"new paste is a good start but I'd also be gone one step further and getting a good heatsink with large fan for airflow and checking the chassis fans."

I have ordered my new thermal paste (kryonaut thermal grease 1g) which will take a week for me to receive it.

My tower has 3*120 fans in the front and 1*140 fan at the rear which are all working fine. My current setup of AIO is something like this:
Rear Fan (1*140)<<Mobo<<AIO Fan (1*120)<<Radiator<<Front Fans (3*120).
Where"<<" being the indicative of the airflow. All the fans are working and the radiator is setup in the vertical mount with the tubes at the bottom.

how much dust has built up around the fan blades and air vents?

No dust as I maintain it every once in 2-3 month.

what software are you using to test the temps?

AIDA64(trial), Intel Extreme Tuning utility, System performance monitor, cinebench, CPU-Z etc. I have attached the images of the results below.

Thank you so much for helping me :thumbsup:

Bruce · Oct 21, 2020

sorry, i missed the fact you had water cooling.
how old is the AIO system?
I'm wondering if the liquid inside may have gone off.
I only got into water cooling about a year ago when I upgraded by stock CPU heatsink with a NZXT Kraken system and during my research, the open systems where you have a reservoir seem to need the liquid completely replaced every couple of years.
any dust within the radiator fins?

with the temp going that high that quickly, it may be as simple as the paste.

freestyler24 · Oct 21, 2020

Bruce said:
sorry, i missed the fact you had water cooling.
how old is the AIO system?
I'm wondering if the liquid inside may have gone off.
I only got into water cooling about a year ago when I upgraded by stock CPU heatsink with a NZXT Kraken system and during my research, the open systems where you have a reservoir seem to need the liquid completely replaced every couple of years.
any dust within the radiator fins?

with the temp going that high that quickly, it may be as simple as the paste.

AIO is over 4 years now. And I have RPM readings on HW Monitor. So I guess it is working. Only option for me is to wait for the paste to arrive and check if it's solving the problem.
I wanted to know if there are any optimizations that I need to perform while I wait for the Thermal Paste?

Bruce · Oct 21, 2020

i agree, let's wait for the paste.

freestyler24 · Oct 22, 2020

Hello Guys, Thank you all for helping me out. I figured out the exact issue with my temps reaching 100°..
1. When I checked the AIO orientation/positioning, it was mounted like this:
<<airflow<<Back Fan 140*1 <<airflow<< Motherboard ??airflow?? Radiator fan>>airflow>>Radiator>><<airflow<<Front Fans 120*3

If you look at the above airflow indicator radiator fan was installed incorrectly by the pc builder who assembled the pc and since then I was using it like this. There was a tension between the airflow though the radiator which was mounted vertically with the pipes at the bottom. So I strongly felt maybe that's the issue and removed the radiator and the fan and installed it on top of the case lie this:
Top-<<airflow<<case<<radiator<<airflow<<Fan*120-Bottom (vertically).

After the above setup the temps were down to 40°-50° while idle and during AIDA64 stress test (all tests selected), the temps did touch the thermal throttle with 100° but as compared to before(30sec) it hit the throttle in about 5 minutes. This made me confident that the AIO is working but there is some kind of connectivity issues between the AIO and the CPU. Also found an old stock thermal paste that came with the AIO in my nzxt case box.

2. When I finally opened my AIO Block, I was raged to see the plastic sticker that comes on the AIO block out of the box still on the block! The genius who assembled the PC did not remove it before placing it on top of CPU. If you see the images you can see the thermal paste on it. Thermal paste was like a thick layer of paint stuck on the processor. With a lot of patience and time it came off with ISO PROPYL ALCOHOL 99% and the cloth. But not as easily as Linus shows in his video. It took a good 20-30mins to remove it. I didn't wanted to brick it.

Now with the stock CM thermal paste and block with out the plastic cover it is idling at 30-31° on average and with AIDA64 stress test(all selected tests) it is reaching a max temps of 50-51° during an hour test.

Only thing now to figure out is to fix my CPU usage at 100% during the stress test. Is it normal to have 100% usage while gaming or stress test?

Bruce · Oct 22, 2020

I'd love to say the builder was a complete and utter {insert expletive here}, but to be fair who of us hasn't done something similar ourselves?
but still..... that's pretty stupid.

as to the 100% during games, that would indicate to me that the CPU isn't meeting the games minimum requirements,

freestyler24 · Oct 22, 2020

Bruce said:
I'd love to say the builder was a complete and utter {insert expletive here}, but to be fair who of us hasn't done something similar ourselves?
but still..... that's pretty stupid.

as to the 100% during games, that would indicate to me that the CPU isn't meeting the games minimum requirements,

I know right. It would have fried my CPU in the worst case. Being a builder and charging money ($40) for just assembling the part they should be more careful.

CS Go is the only game that I play and I think it doesn't take much of anything.. Maybe it is the graphics card which is bottlenecking my CPU. I am not really sure. Maybe I'll try reinstalling my OS (read somewhere that it fixes CPU usage issues). If that doesn't work then I'll wait for some more help.

freestyler24 · Oct 23, 2020

To conclude I would say that I am really thankful to @Bruce for all your assistance and guidance. Will fight the battle of CPU usage issues another day..

Bruce · Oct 23, 2020

no worries at all - glad to help.

and yeah, it could very well be a GPU and/or CPUI thing.
only last month, my PC mag had an article on just how much data GPU's still pass off to the CPU for work.

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