Hey there! I've got a bit of a crisis with my PC. It's pretty new (only 5-6 months old), and I recently cleaned it for the first time. I have an Intel i5-12400F paired with an Ant Esports ICE C400 LED air cooler and a Gigabyte B760M H DDR4 motherboard. After cleaning, my CPU temperatures are all over the place—it sits around 58°C in the BIOS, but as soon as I boot into Windows, it jumps to 80-90°C and sometimes even spikes to nearly 100°C at idle! My CPU fan is working hard and making some weird rattling noises, but cooling just isn't effective anymore. Before cleaning, the temperatures were stable. I've stopped using it for now since I'm worried about damage. I'm wondering if this is likely a problem with the cooler mounting or the thermal paste, and if I should avoid powering it on until I fix it. Can cleaning alone cause such a drastic temperature increase?
1 Answer
It sounds like you've got a cooler mounting issue on your hands. I'd recommend removing the cooler, cleaning off the old thermal paste, and applying a fresh layer before reseating it. If that doesn't solve the problem, then there might be another underlying issue, which would be kind of odd given how new your setup is.
Alright thank you friend!