The Intel 285K CPU in my high-end 2025 Linux PC died again! 😡 Notably, this was the replacement CPU for the original 285K that died in March, and after reading through the reviews of Intel CPUs on my electronics store of choice, many of which (!) mention CPU replacements, I am getting the impression that Intel’s current CPUs just are not stable 😞. Therefore, I am giving up on Intel for the coming years and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D CPU instead.
Looks like they didn’t have adequate cooling for their CPU, killed it… Then replaced it without correcting the cooling. If your CPU hits 3 digits, it’s not cooled properly.
damn… its sitting at 301 Kelvin currently…
If your CPU hits 3 digits, then throttling isn’t working properly, because it should kick in before it hits that point.
The article (or one of the linked ones) says the max design temperature is 105°C, so it doesn’t throttle until it hits that.
Which makes me think it should be able to sustain operating at that temperature. If not, Intel fucked up by speccing them too high.
I’d expect it to still throttle before getting to 105C, and then adjust to maintain a temp under 105C. If it goes above 105C, it should halt.
Then you misunderstand the spec. That’s the max operating temperature, not the thermal protection limit. It throttles at 105 so it doesn’t hit the limit at 115 or whatever and shut down. I can’t find a detailed spec sheet that might give an exact figure.
The chip needs to account for thermal runaway, so I’d expect it to throttle before reaching max operating temperature and then adjust so it stays within that range. So it should downclock a little around 90C or whatever, the increase as needed as it approaches 105C or whatever the max operating temp is. If it goes above that temp, it should aggressively throttle or halt, depending how how far above it went and how quickly.
No it shouldn’t slow down at 90C, it should clock up until it can sustain exactly 105C and stay there. That’s the optimal performance point.
Again, you misunderstand. The max operating temperature is where Intel has stated that the CPU can safely operate for extended periods of time, including accounting for situations like thermal runaway (though ideally they engineer the chip that that doesn’t happen in the first place).
If that situation does occur, the chip attempts to throttle at 105, and if that fails then it presumable halts at whatever the protection threshold is before it hits the actual damage point, as I said.
Interesting, so it only throttles at that temp? That’d a bit different than how AMD handles it IIRC, which think stops boosting around 80C or so and throttles around 90C, and the max operating temp is closer to 100C.
The 7000 series had the Intel behavior of just clocking up until like 95C and staying there indefinitely
That’s why people thought the 9000 series was disappointment - AMD went back to balancing power efficiency and performance
It’s not really that different, the exact temperatures are slightly higher but most intel processors will boost up to 105C, then start throttling to maintain that 105C as a maximum, and if that’s not possible they’ll halt at 110C.
AMD does the same, just the temps are (for the one specific CPU I remember them for) 80-85C for starting dialing down the boost, 90C for throttling below the normal freq, and 95C for TjMax which either halts the system or just drops the power usage so low it doesn’t matter - I’m not about to take a heatgun to my CPU to see what it does as it wasn’t capable of hitting that on its own.
But it shouldn’t be possible to break your CPU from over temperature, no matter what those temps are, because they should be capable of protecting themselves, even if that means dropping to 386 speeds when you are running them in the Death Valley with not cooler whatsoever.
Yes.
Whether Intel fucked up by saying “oh yeah works great up to 105” if that isn’t actually true is another question, as I mentioned.
Why? It’s designed to run up to 105c.
I think it was when AMDs 7000 series CPUs were running at 95c and everyone freaked out that AMD came out and said that the CPUs are built to handle this load 24/7 365 for years on end.
And it’s not like this is new to Intel. Intel laptop CPUs have been doing this for a decade now.
CPUs should throttle as they approach the limit to prevent thermal runaway. As it gets closer to that limit, it should adjust the frequency in smaller increments until it arrives at that temp to keep the changes to temps small.
105c is the max operating temperature. It’s not going to run away the second it hits 106.
Your CPU starts throttling at 104c so that way it almost never hits at 105c for long If it can’t maintain clocks then it drops them until 104c can mostly be maintained.
If you have an improperly mounted cooler, you could very well get to 105C incredibly quickly, and 115C or whatever the halt temp is shortly after.
My intel mac’s cpu (i5-5250U) throttles to maintain 105 C
laughs in 8700k
When I overclock this old chip (which it was built for) it can hit over 100 with proper cooling. Some chips are hot as fuck. I think this one shuts off at 105.
That’s not the case. 100% for new CPUs, but also for old ones too.
My father’s old CPU cooler did not make good contact, got lose in one corner some how, and the system would throttle (fan at 100% making noise and PC run slow). After i fixed it, in one of my visits, CPU was working fine for years.
System throttles or even shuts down before any thermal damage occures (at least when temperatures rise normally).
Pretty much anything with a heat spreader should be impossible to accidentally kill. Bare die? May dog have mercy on your soul.
What if it hits around 90°C during Vulkan shader processing? 😅 Otherwise like 42–52 idle. How’s that? I’m wondering if my cooling is sufficient.
This is an AMD 9950X3D + 9070 XT setup, for reference.
Any way to do Vulkan shader processing on the GPU perhaps, to speed it up?
Slight under volt, or upgrade cooler. 90c is too hot sustainably. Idle high 40s to 50s is not the best. Find a better air cooler or use a 240 AIO atleast.
I did some quick research.
I feel confident now. My CPU and cooling seems perfectly nominal. 😌👌
If your running that CPU then you almost certainly have done research or have money. Either way. Enjoy the setup you’ve got a good cooler and CPU it seems.
Not true, 95C is the rated safe operating temperature
Thats what the manufacturer says but… 95c is damn near boiling at 203f. That is too hot to sustain any good longevity of a part, and any good workload for any component in a PC. That is a lot of heat. You will not get the best performance for a processor at its maximum temperatures running it like that all the time or even close to its max operating temp. I’m not saying you can’t hit that number but ideally you really really shouldn’t.
So what I said I think stands. Upgrade to a better air cooler and if need be a water cooler at least a 240AIO nothing smaller period. Keep temps lower and parts last longer. Performance boosts during core loads hold clocks longer. No question.
The processor is not made out of water so the boiling point of water doesn’t affect it
In fact you will get the best performance at 95C because to decrease it means to decrease the clocks
If you mean to get a better cooling solution that would be better, but then running it at 95C with that better cooling solution would be better again
Once you reach a cooling solution that can take it to the maximum clocks, then there will be no performance benefit between 70C and 95C at the same clocks and you can reduce the fan speed to hit the higher temperature at less noise
Your CPU isn’t made of water. Yes, this is safe to do. The manufacturer is on the hook for warranties if this goes wrong, and they know it.
The main concern would be lower quality electrolytic capacitors on the motherboard VRM, but they tend not to use low quality caps these days except maybe on budget boards.
The VRM temperature is a different sensor. You can have 69C VRMs when your processor is 95C
You got a better suggestion for an air cooler than this one that I have?
https://noctua.at/en/nh-d15-g2-lbc
Much appreciated.
The Noctua NH 15 is a great air cooler one of the best air coolers actually. What are you pairing it to? What CPU?
Almost all things noctua are good. However. They are expensive and if you’re not plotting on future cpu high TDP chips it’s overkill. I don’t honestly see the need to drop that much money on a CPU cooler. There’s near equal more cost effective options. Unless your doing major overclocks, cpu heavy loads at near max clock speed constantly where you think major wear and tear will happen I don’t for see the need to spend that much. I’ve built many many PCs.
You can find comparable air coolers much cheaper. Think 50 to 80 range and technically you can score them on eBay for cheaper than that. Look at the Phantom spirit 120 cheapest 30 to 40 usd, AK620 1 to 3c cooler than phantom 50 to 65usd, frost commander 140 80usd, noctua DH 15 150 to 180usd.
Of course prices fluctuate. Those get you the best ranked air coolers for the most part. Their all within roughly 5C of each other. All good coolers. Take the extra money savings and add to a GPU or whatever part you really need. I just seen you already have the noctua dh15 so in that case you were testing me to see what I knew. LOL. Enjoy you got a great cooler.
I wrote the CPU and GPU in the very first comment…
I already bought these components and built the computer already. 😄 It’s a pretty much maximum spec’d AMD system, and I’m privileged to buy the parts tax free through work, so I just went ham.
The only thing is that my 3900X in my previous build was running about 39–42°C idle, so I was worried I’d made some kind of error with the cooling paste or messed up the mounting of the cooler or something.
Definitely not; was genuinely a bit concerned, that’s all.
Near the boiling point of water, sure. I don’t have any water in my system, though. Unless there’s water in the cooling paste? I dunno.
Anyway, there’s a lot of saying this and saying that in these replies to my question without any links to references, so I think I’ll do some proper research instead. 😅
It’s fine, modern CPUs boost until they either hit amperage, voltage, or thermal constraints, assuming the motherboard isn’t behaving badly then the upper limits for all of those are safe to be at perpetually.
AMDs 7000 series CPUs were designed to boost until they hit 95c, then maintain those temps. 9000 series behaves differently for boosting, but the silicon can handle it.
Okay cool, then I feel more confident. This is only my second build, ever, so I’m a little bit nervous. I didn’t buy any extra fans apart from the ones that came with my case. But I did get that beasty Noctua gen 2 air cooler, and it seems to be holding so far, even in the hot summer air.
If you’re talking about the Steam feature you can safely turn it off, any modern hardware running mesa radv (the default AMD vulkan driver in most distros) should be sufficient to process shaders in real-time thanks to ACO.
What does it mean to “process shaders in real-time”? Wouldn’t it be objectively faster to process them ahead-of-time? Even if it’s only slightly faster while running the game?
I mean processing takes like a minute or so, so it’s no big deal. I’m just curious for the fun of it, if I can compile it on the GPU. Not sure it’s even possible.
Processing them as they’re loaded, quickly enough that there’s no noticeable frame drop. Usual LLVM based shader compilers aren’t fast enough for that but ACO is specifically written to compile shaders for AMD GPUs and makes this feasible.
Pre-compilation would in theory always yield higher 1% lows yes, but it’s not really worth the time hit anymore especially for games that constantly require a new cache to be built or have really long compilation times.
I think the one additional thing Steam does in that step is transcoding videos so they can be played back with Proton’s codec set but using something like Proton-GE, Proton-cachyos or Proton-EM solves this too.
Disclaimer: I don’t know how the deeply technical stuff of this works so this might not be exact.
Huh.
Well like I said it only takes like a minute with half of my 32 threads utilized at 100 % (so all of my cores I guess?). Might as well keep doing it I suppose.
How far back does that go? My AMD 6000 series GPU probably doesn’t need it, but what about my old laptop APU (3500U?).