5 ms·

enable settings that capped max watts and temperature for throttling to 90c. You were going above 90C before??? My first thought is that seems insane, but is

enable settings that capped max watts and temperature for throttling to 90c. You were going above 90C before??? My first thought is that seems insane, but is apparently normal for that chip, according to Intel: "your processor supports up to 100°C and any temperatures below it are normal and expected" https://community.intel.com/t5/Processors/i9-14900K-temperatures/td-p/1540728 https://community.intel.com/t5/Processors/i9-14900K-temperat... That is just wild though. On one hand you should obviously get the performance that was advertised and that you paid for. On the other hand IMO operating a CPU at 90-100C is just insane. It really feels like utter desperation on Intel's part. I would be curious what kind of cooling setup you have.

legosexmagic 3y ago
the amount of cooling you get is proportional to the difference of component temperature to ambient temperature. thats why modern chips are engineered to run much hotter.
- jnxx 3y ago
  Until Dust Puppy kills 'em
dist-epoch 3y ago
For both Intel/AMD 100C is now a target, not a limit.
- hulitu 3y ago
  And for the consumer, changing the computer every 2 years, because the processor died, is a limit, not a target. /s
bee_rider 3y ago
Hey, is there a cooling solution that sprays water on some sort of heat spreader and lets it evaporate? Kidding. Kinda. But actually, is that possible?
- Analemma_ 3y ago
  That's essentially what vapor chamber coolers are. It's a sealed unit where the working fluid evaporates on the CPU end, absorbing a ton of heat, and then condenses on the other side, before going back to do the cycle again. Because the heat of vaporization is so large, these can move a lot more heat than ordinary heat sinks.
- smolder 3y ago
  Heat pipes sort of do that naturally without any active "spraying". They contain a fluid that phase changes and carries heat away. Closed loop water coolers have the active flow of water you want for maximum effect. I don't think your idea would be an improvement on that.
jcalvinowens 3y ago
> On the other hand IMO operating a CPU at 90-100C is just insane. No it isn't, the manufacturer literally says it's normal! I think people who spend as much money on cooling setups as the chip are the insane ones. My favorite story: I once put Linux on a big machine that had been running windows, and discovered dmesg was full of thermal throttling alerts. Turns out, the heatsink was not in contact with the CPU die because it had a nub that needed to occupy the same space as a little capacitor. I'd been using that machine to play X-plane for over two years, and I never noticed. It was not meaningfully slower: the throttling events would only happen every ten or so seconds. I'm still using it today, although with the heatsink fixed :) I have a garage machine with a ca. 2014 Haswell that's been running full tilt at 90C+ for a good bit of its life. It just won't die.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  I have a garage machine with a ca. 2014 Haswell that's been running full tilt at 90C+ for a good bit of its life. It just won't die. First of all: that's awesome. Second: what's it doing spending that much time "full-tilt?" Just curious. Sounds like something interesting.
  - jcalvinowens 3y ago
    Alas, nothing that interesting. It mined bitcoin for awhile, back when it was feasible to make practically useful quantities of it that way. Never profitably obviously. Right now, I use it as a 200W space heater I can turn off and on via SSH, just running busyloops. It works well enough for a single car garage in California.
crote 3y ago
Temperatures like that have been fairly normal for a few generations now - both for Intel and AMD. It might look insane compared to what you were used to seeing a decade ago, but it's actually not that crazy. First, the temperature sensors got a lot better. Previously you only had one sensor per core/cpu, and it was placed wherever there was space - nowadays it'll have dozens of sensors placed in the most likely hotspots. A decade ago a 70C temp meant that some parts of the CPU were closer to 90C, whereas nowadays a 90C temp means the hottest part is actually 90C. Second, the better sensors allow more accurate tuning. While 100C might be totally fine, 120C is probably already going to cause serious damage. The problem here is that you can't just rely on a somewhat-distant sensor to always be a constant 20C below the peak value: it's also going to be lagging a bit. It might take a tenth of a second for that temp spike in the hotspot to reach the sensor, but in the time between the spike starting and the temp at the sensor raising enough to trigger a downthrottle you could've already caused serious damage. A decade ago that meant leaving some margin for safety, but these days they can just keep going right up to the limit. It's also why overclocking simply isn't really a "thing" anymore. Previous CPUs had plenty of safety margin left for risk-takers to exploit, modern CPUs use up all that margin by automatically overclocking until it hits either a temperature limit or a power draw limit.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  Exactly. Temperature measurements are a lot like available memory measurements in that regard. People wonder why the OS uses up all available memory, and it's because the OS knows that empty memory is useless, while memory used to cache disk is potentially useful (and can always be discarded when that memory is needed for something else). So, the persistent state of memory is always "full". Similarly, processors convert thermal headroom to performance, until they run out of thermal headroom. So if you improve the cooling on a processor that has work to do (rather than sleeping), it will use up that cooling and perform better, rather than performing the same and running cooler. (Mobile processors operate differently, since they need to maintain a much tighter thermal envelope to not burn the user. And processors can also target power levels rather than thermals. But when a processor is in its default "run as fast as possible" mode, its normal operating temperature will be close to the 100C limit.)

legosexmagic 3y ago

the amount of cooling you get is proportional to the difference of component temperature to ambient temperature. thats why modern chips are engineered to run much hotter.

jnxx 3y ago
Until Dust Puppy kills 'em

dist-epoch 3y ago

For both Intel/AMD 100C is now a target, not a limit.

hulitu 3y ago
And for the consumer, changing the computer every 2 years, because the processor died, is a limit, not a target. /s

bee_rider 3y ago

Hey, is there a cooling solution that sprays water on some sort of heat spreader and lets it evaporate? Kidding. Kinda. But actually, is that possible?

Analemma_ 3y ago
That's essentially what vapor chamber coolers are. It's a sealed unit where the working fluid evaporates on the CPU end, absorbing a ton of heat, and then condenses on the other side, before going back to do the cycle again. Because the heat of vaporization is so large, these can move a lot more heat than ordinary heat sinks.
smolder 3y ago
Heat pipes sort of do that naturally without any active "spraying". They contain a fluid that phase changes and carries heat away. Closed loop water coolers have the active flow of water you want for maximum effect. I don't think your idea would be an improvement on that.

jcalvinowens 3y ago

> On the other hand IMO operating a CPU at 90-100C is just insane. No it isn't, the manufacturer literally says it's normal! I think people who spend as much money on cooling setups as the chip are the insane ones. My favorite story: I once put Linux on a big machine that had been running windows, and discovered dmesg was full of thermal throttling alerts. Turns out, the heatsink was not in contact with the CPU die because it had a nub that needed to occupy the same space as a little capacitor. I'd been using that machine to play X-plane for over two years, and I never noticed. It was not meaningfully slower: the throttling events would only happen every ten or so seconds. I'm still using it today, although with the heatsink fixed :) I have a garage machine with a ca. 2014 Haswell that's been running full tilt at 90C+ for a good bit of its life. It just won't die.

JohnBooty 3y ago
I have a garage machine with a ca. 2014 Haswell that's been running full tilt at 90C+ for a good bit of its life. It just won't die. First of all: that's awesome. Second: what's it doing spending that much time "full-tilt?" Just curious. Sounds like something interesting.
- jcalvinowens 3y ago
  Alas, nothing that interesting. It mined bitcoin for awhile, back when it was feasible to make practically useful quantities of it that way. Never profitably obviously. Right now, I use it as a 200W space heater I can turn off and on via SSH, just running busyloops. It works well enough for a single car garage in California.

crote 3y ago

Temperatures like that have been fairly normal for a few generations now - both for Intel and AMD. It might look insane compared to what you were used to seeing a decade ago, but it's actually not that crazy. First, the temperature sensors got a lot better. Previously you only had one sensor per core/cpu, and it was placed wherever there was space - nowadays it'll have dozens of sensors placed in the most likely hotspots. A decade ago a 70C temp meant that some parts of the CPU were closer to 90C, whereas nowadays a 90C temp means the hottest part is actually 90C. Second, the better sensors allow more accurate tuning. While 100C might be totally fine, 120C is probably already going to cause serious damage. The problem here is that you can't just rely on a somewhat-distant sensor to always be a constant 20C below the peak value: it's also going to be lagging a bit. It might take a tenth of a second for that temp spike in the hotspot to reach the sensor, but in the time between the spike starting and the temp at the sensor raising enough to trigger a downthrottle you could've already caused serious damage. A decade ago that meant leaving some margin for safety, but these days they can just keep going right up to the limit. It's also why overclocking simply isn't really a "thing" anymore. Previous CPUs had plenty of safety margin left for risk-takers to exploit, modern CPUs use up all that margin by automatically overclocking until it hits either a temperature limit or a power draw limit.

JoshTriplett 3y ago
Exactly. Temperature measurements are a lot like available memory measurements in that regard. People wonder why the OS uses up all available memory, and it's because the OS knows that empty memory is useless, while memory used to cache disk is potentially useful (and can always be discarded when that memory is needed for something else). So, the persistent state of memory is always "full". Similarly, processors convert thermal headroom to performance, until they run out of thermal headroom. So if you improve the cooling on a processor that has work to do (rather than sleeping), it will use up that cooling and perform better, rather than performing the same and running cooler. (Mobile processors operate differently, since they need to maintain a much tighter thermal envelope to not burn the user. And processors can also target power levels rather than thermals. But when a processor is in its default "run as fast as possible" mode, its normal operating temperature will be close to the 100C limit.)