I recently had a new gaming PC built and I'm trying to figure out whether my CPU temperatures are too high. The system uses a Ryzen 7 9850X3D, an Arctic Liquid Freezer Pro 360mm AIO, and seven 120mm Arctic case fans in a large Lian Li O11D EVO case. Three fans provide intake from the side and bottom, while the radiator and rear fan exhaust hot air.
The PC is only about a week old, and I'm confident the builders installed everything correctly. I also tried undervolting the CPU, but it didn't noticeably change the temperatures. At idle, the CPU sits around 45°C, and during Battlefield 6 it reaches about 70°C. However, when launching some games—especially Marvel Rivals—the CPU briefly reaches 85–90°C while shaders are being compiled. Cinebench reaches roughly 82°C at most.
The system was expensive, so I'm worried that these spikes could damage the processor or cause thermal throttling. Are these temperatures normal, and is there anything else I should do to keep the CPU cooler?
3 Answers
Those temperatures are well within the expected range. The processor is designed to manage its performance and temperature automatically, with a maximum operating temperature around 95°C. A 45°C idle temperature, roughly 70°C while gaming, and short spikes into the 85–90°C range are not unusual for a modern X3D chip.
There probably isn’t a hardware or airflow problem here. The practical ways to reduce temperatures further would be increasing fan and pump speeds, lowering the room temperature, or reducing CPU power limits. Undervolting may not make much difference depending on the chip and motherboard settings. Since your gaming temperatures are already reasonable, changing anything is optional rather than necessary.
Shader compilation can put a surprisingly heavy load on the CPU, sometimes more than normal gameplay. Higher temperatures during that process are expected, and the CPU has built-in safeguards that reduce performance or shut the system down if temperatures ever become unsafe. You can let the compilation finish without worrying that it will cook the processor.
That’s reassuring. I was mainly worried because the temperature jumps during the initial game launch, even though Cinebench only reaches about 82°C.