CPU Temperature Periodically Spiking up to 100C under low load

[mmiller73]

Hi All,

A little background, I am totally new to CPU overclocking and wasn't really trying to do any sort of overclocking on my computer but recently started playing Diablo 4 and my computer kept crashing.  It would either totally freeze up or blue screen at times, requiring a power cycle to fix.  Initially this seemed to be a launch issue with software but the tech support suggested my hardware was at fault.

After looking into it, I realized my CPU kept spiking temperature and hitting 100C when playing, even with a relatively small CPU load when looking at the resource monitor.

I have an ASUS ROG Strix Z590-E motherboard with an 11th gen core i9-11900k CPU with the built in BIOS AI overclocking settings, So I changed the BIOS setting for AI Overclocking and initially that seemed to fix my problem, the temperature spiking stopped and I was able to run the game without issue.  The CPU would sit at like 65-70C while playing.

But over the course of like 2-3 days, the temps kept getting hotter and hotter, where now they routinely redline at 100C.  Initially, this didn't seem to cause any issues, but I rebooted for some reason to try changing the BIOS settings a bit and the machine wouldn't start, giving a CPU over temperature warning, enter settings, etc.

I guess I have a couple of questions:

--What can I look at to get my temperatures under control? I'm not needing any sort of extreme performance, just want to make sure I'm not damaging my machine and would also like to run games with semi decent performance.

--Is it normal for CPU temperatures to spike from between 60-70C up to 90-100C? And will that cause me problems long term?

Other system specs are:

3080ti GPU

64GB DDR4 RAM

Water cooler

The machine is clean and has relatively little dust in it, it's pretty new.  So any ideas or suggestions would be super super appreciated.

Thank you,

Mike

[mmiller73]

Solved by swapping the cables to the motherboard's 2nd AIO header slot, seems to have either not been seated properly or one of the slots is bad possibly, just moved connector from one slot to the 2nd slot.  That seems to have fixed the cooling problem.