I recently installed a 7700X3D with a Peerless Assassin 120 Digital ARGB cooler in a Phantom 410 case. The case has two intake fans and one exhaust fan, and I applied the thermal paste in an X pattern. My GPU temperatures look normal, but Overwatch sometimes pushes the CPU to around 80–82°C even when there does not seem to be much happening. Other times it stays around 63–66°C during busy teamfights. In most other games, it briefly spikes to about 75°C and usually sits near 66°C or lower. At the desktop, with a few browser tabs and Steam open, it runs around 53°C. Are these temperatures normal, or should I check the cooler, airflow, thermal paste, or game settings?
4 Answers
Overall CPU usage does not always tell the whole story. A game can heavily load only a few cores, causing temperature spikes while total utilization still looks modest. Overwatch may simply be creating a different workload than your other games.
You could check whether the game is set to an automatic frame-rate limit. Sometimes updates change that setting, and an uncapped or unusually high frame rate can make the CPU work harder than expected. Setting a manual FPS cap may smooth out the temperatures, but the numbers you listed are not dangerous.
Those temperatures are completely fine. A CPU reaching around 80°C under gaming loads is well within its normal operating range, especially for an X3D chip. Better thermal paste or a cooler case might lower it by a few degrees, but there is no urgent problem here.
X3D processors can run surprisingly warm because of how the extra cache is placed between the cores and the heat spreader. Certain games may produce higher temperatures even at lower overall CPU utilization, so an occasional 80°C reading is expected with a decent cooler.
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