“Back in my day, CPUs did not magically overclock themselves!”
This is a phrase you might hear from people who have been building PC’s for quite a while. The reality these days are that companies such as Intel and AMD are competing to have the fastest possible parts available. At the same time, motherboard manufacturers does the exact same. This has resulted in a trend where modern CPU’s such as the Intel 14900K and AMD 7950X will draw an obscene amount of power to squeeze out those last few drops of performance.
The result of this is that you will have a CPU that will draw more power than it is technically rated for, and thus become extremely warm. If you own any of the recent high-end CPU’s you will know that temperatures in the 90’s are just business as usual.
Now, the good news is that while these temperatures sound extremely high and dangerous, they aren't. Modern CPU’s are designed to (if allowed to do so in your motherboard settings) boost as high as they can, until they hit a power limitation, or a temperature limitation. When this happens, they will automatically start slowing down ever so slightly until they are within those limitations.
Where this affects CPU coolers is that the motherboard will read the temperature of your CPU, and adjust the fan speeds accordingly (at least for fans that are connected directly to the CPU_FAN header on the motherboard). Now, this is bad because if the CPU automatically boost until it reaches 80-90 degrees, the fans on your CPU air cooler will be running at 100% speed, and be very loud.
Technically no. If you bought a much smaller air cooler, the CPU would do the exact same thing, the difference is that it would just be running at a slightly slower speed. In reality, if you use your PC for gaming, and not intensive multi core tasks, this is not something you will feel all that much.
Before we proceed into the details below, it is important to know that what is recommended below is an opinion of a technical marketing team member in CORSAIR. Adjusting these values WILL make your CPU run slightly slower than if you where to leave the cooler open to run the fans at 100%. How much exactly will depend on your system. In gaming it is very likely that you will never even notice a difference.
In our case, we did testing with a 14900K. In bios, we enabled “enforce INTEL POR” which effectively means that the CPU power limit is the 253W that Intel specifies for the 14900K. Alternatively you can manually set PL1 and PL2 power limits to 253, but it is not needed. You will still get the benefits of a more quiet system regardless if you adjust these settings, or not.
Today's testing platform, a Gigabyte Z790 Master, 32GB DDR5 Vengeance memory and a 14900K
The CORSAIR A115 (or any cooler for that matter) will have fans on it that are rated for a set RPM. In our case, the fans on the A115 max out at 1700RPM. This is because the cooler is rated for 280W and we wanted to give people the option to cool even an unlocked and overclocked 14900K – if they wanted to.
The reality is that many people prefer a much quieter system over a 3% FPS increase in game (this is an estimated fictional number).
Let’s have a look at our testing. We ran Cinebench 2024 (a program that renders a 3D scene, utilizing all available CPU cores to 100%) for 30 minutes at both 1225RPM, and the full 1700RPM on the cooler.
We log two values, the average temperature of the performance cores during the last 15 minutes of the run, and the average CPU package temperature during the last 15 minutes of the run. Both values are adjusted live for the ambient temperature in the room at the time of the run to ensure comparable results.
Now, sound is very subjective and it is hard to use number such as X Db to anything. In our opinion, 1200-1400RPM on the CORSAIR A115 Air cooler is a very balanced option between performance and noise, so that is our reason for having the fans at 1250RPM.
As seen in the graph above, running the A115 CPU cooler at 1250 RPM versus it’s max speed of 1700 RPM will give an increase of roughly 4-5 degrees with our 14900K running at 253W (intel POR).
Do note that the temperatures above are delta temperatures which is why they will seem low if you compare against your own 14900K temperatures. We do this as a change in room temperature by 2 degrees from one test to another will of course lead to incomparable results. So if we adjust for this, the actual CPU temperatures running at 1250RPM is 82.7 degrees Celsius on the CPU package, and 78.4 average on the performance cores.
If you do not set the power limit to 253W, then it is very likely that you will see temperatures in the high 90’s regardless of what fan speed you pick since the CPU will automatically try and overclock itself as high as it can go.
You have a few options:
Maximum performance – high noise / temperatures / power draw
Balanced performance – high temperatures / power draw but with greatly reduced sound levels
Optimized performance – low noise / power draw and sound levels
If you do not care about noise or use headphones while gaming anyways, we recommend just sticking with maximum performance. But if you do want to optimize your system the balanced performance is what most people should go with, as it still allows the CPU to run as fast as it can. The optimized performance is more recommended if you are worried about your power consumption, or have your PC in a very warm environment. But let’s be real, if you bought a 14900K you can afford a big power bill.
The vast majority of people using air coolers such as the A115 will plug them directly into the motherboard, and let the board handle everything. Below we will run you through how to set a max fan speed on a gigabyte motherboard, but the process is largely the same from board to board.
You can do it either in the BIOS (continuously press the DEL key while your system is starting up to enter BIOS), or via your motherboards software to control fans. We typically just go into BIOS as it is fastest, and allows us to run with as little software as possible. If you own a CORSAIR fan controller such as the Commander Core XT, this can also be done in the ICUE software (and much quicker).
Steps:
We would advice to run a program such as Cinebench 2024 or R23 to establish a baseline performance before you start changing settings. You can then run the same benchmark once you are done to see if you are experiencing any unexpected performance drops
Note: you should run the benchmark in a loop for 10-15 minutes to saturate your cooler, as a single run will not give you an accurate result of cooling performance. If you are curious about other benchmark programs, we wrote a detailed guide on how to test your system in full for stability What tools to use to test your PC with
And that is it! You have now successfully optimized your system. If you have other case fans that are also dependent on CPU temperatures you can do the same for them, but we recommend having a baseline for what temperatures and performance your system should be achieving so you do not accidentally change something that gives you a 50% performance drop.
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