I recently had a new gaming PC built and I'm worried about the CPU temperature during certain games. The system has a Ryzen 7 9850X3D, an Arctic Liquid Freezer Pro 360mm AIO, seven 120mm case fans, and a large Lian Li X11D EVO case. Three fans provide intake from the side and bottom, while the radiator and rear fan exhaust hot air.
At idle, the CPU sits around 45°C, and while playing Battlefield 6 it usually reaches about 70°C. However, when launching some games—especially Marvel Rivals—the shader compilation process pushes the CPU to around 85–90°C. Cinebench reaches roughly 82°C at most. I've also tried undervolting, but it didn't make much difference.
The PC is only about a week old, so I'm concerned that something may be wrong even though the builders are experienced. Are these temperatures safe, and is there anything else I should do to reduce them?
3 Answers
There doesn’t appear to be a cooling problem here. If you still want lower readings, the practical options are increasing the fan and pump curves or lowering the room temperature. Cooling hardware can only bring the CPU closer to ambient temperature, not below it. Since your gaming and benchmark temperatures are already healthy, changing the fan setup or undervolting further probably isn’t necessary.
Shader compilation can put a surprisingly heavy load on the CPU, sometimes more consistently than normal gameplay. It’s expected for temperatures to rise during that process. The CPU has built-in thermal protections and will reduce its speed or shut down if it ever reaches an unsafe limit, so you can let the compilation finish.
Those temperatures are within the normal operating range for this CPU. Ryzen X3D chips can boost toward their thermal limit—around 95°C—when the workload allows it. Around 45°C at idle and 70°C while gaming are both perfectly reasonable, and brief spikes to 85–90°C during shader compilation aren’t a sign that the system is failing.
That’s reassuring. I was mainly worried because the system was expensive and the temperature jumps happen right when a game is starting, but it sounds like shader compilation is just an unusually heavy workload.