Breathing new life into my main production PC - 7980XE cooling dilemma

**Part One: The Upgrade Journey**

I've spent years honing my skills with the Noctua D 15 and D 14 coolers, specifically designed to handle high-TDP processors like the FX 95 90. I've studied every benchmark that's been done on these coolers, particularly when it comes to CPU benchmarks for the Intel Core i9-7900Xe, which can reach speeds of up to 4.4 GHz with the same cooler. These results have convinced me that this is the right choice for my workstation build.

However, despite having years of experience and a thorough understanding of the cooler's capabilities, I recently encountered an issue that left me stumped. The CPU was not cooling properly, and no matter what I did, I couldn't seem to get it stable. I've tried everything from adjusting the fan settings to reapplying the thermal paste underneath the CPU die (IHS). It became clear that the problem lay with the IHS itself.

The IHS is a critical component in any CPU cooler, as it's responsible for dissipating heat away from the processor. In my case, the IHS was not applying even pressure to all sides of the CPU core, resulting in hotspots and reduced cooling performance. After trying various troubleshooting methods, including reapplying thermal paste and experimenting with different fan settings, I realized that the problem was more complex than initially thought.

I've decided to take a step back and reassess my approach. Given my experience and knowledge, I know what works and what doesn't, but sometimes even the best-laid plans can go awry. In this case, it seems that I've hit a wall with regards to pushing my CPU to its limits without compromising cooling performance. The next step is to revisit Level 1 Headquarters, where I'll be working with Windle again. He's promised to bring some new materials and tools for the task at hand.

**The Build**

My workstation build has been in the works for a while now, and I'm excited to finally showcase it to you all. The focus is on stability, low maintenance, and ease of use – everything that can be easily set up and left alone. This build will be handling demanding tasks like 4K video production, 64K resolution, and live streaming at high quality.

I've opted for a Be Quiet! case, which is a great fit for my needs. The build features three SATA SSDs for NVMe storage, as well as a terabyte WD Red hard drive for storage needs that won't require immediate access. I'll also be using gigabit networking to ensure fast data transfer speeds.

Another notable component of this build is the USB expansion card, which will provide me with plenty of ports for peripherals and other devices. However, I'm still missing one key piece – a high-end GPU like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980Ti. Once that's in place, I'll be pushing the limits of my build to achieve top-notch performance.

**The Team**

I want to extend a huge thank you to my team for their support and assistance throughout this project. Mr. Goodhand, Hunter, and our Discord server have all been instrumental in helping me troubleshoot issues and provide guidance whenever needed. They've spent countless hours with me working on the build, and I'm grateful for their dedication.

In addition to their individual contributions, they've also provided valuable feedback and insights that have helped shape this build into what it is today. As a content creator, I rely heavily on my community, and I'm proud to be part of a team that's passionate about technology and eager to learn.

**The Final Product**

Once I've completed the final stages of the build – which will likely involve lapping the CPU die (IHS) and adjusting other components as needed – I'll be showcasing this beastly workstation build. It won't be sticker-bombed just yet, but I'm excited to share its full potential with you all.

With 18 cores, 36 threads, and a massive amount of RAM, this build will handle even the most demanding tasks without breaking a sweat. Whether it's 4K video production, live streaming at high quality, or pushing the limits of Apex Legends gameplay, I'm confident that this build will deliver top-notch performance.

Stay tuned for more updates on my build journey and future PC building live streams!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey there today we're doing something a little different we are rebuilding my main production PC and we're doing it live over on twitch.tv slash a post Vox and by time you watch this video it will have already been done but this is my first time well my first time in like 2 years doing a PC building stream and my first time doing it for my main production PC where you know there's a little bit more stress attached and things like that my it's my trunks PC that was originally purple and green themed and it's been serving me quite well with my Intel Core I 979 ATX II things like that however I've run into some specific bottlenecks I wanted to address as well as the fact that it's in a tiny case with terrible airflow and it's really loud and I want to keep it cooler I'm gonna keep it quieter and I want to do it right for v2 for using it through 2019 eff and wait and a few months to be able to do this project so we're gonna include some bits of the livestream some bits of my thoughts as well as some of thoughts on over a year with the i9 79 80 XE at this point and see how it goes so yeah so the goal with today's project was threefold I wanted to make my computer quieter because I was using a very loud case with a lot of fans it was really obnoxious to deal with especially after I had to move it to my desk I wanted to address some of the bottlenecks and some of the improvements that I wanted to make with regards to performance and memory and things like that I've been talking about RAM limitations that have run into and things like that recently and I wanted to make it cooler and ideally improve the overclock a little bit on my i9 for this we swapped over to the be quiet dark bass 900 case it's orange and black themed which isn't my favorite theme but I'll deal with it my course effects all stayed the same for the most part so on the Asus workstation sage X $2.99 motherboard my Intel Core I 979 ATX II which was provided by Intel a couple years ago I've got my GTX 10 atti graphics card and then I've got the AVerMedia live gamer 4k Elgato 4k 60 Pro and Blackmagic deck link mini recorder 4k capture cards my Mellanox connect decks ooh 10 gig SFP+ network card and then I've got a sonnet Allegro USB 3.1 expansion card but we had two contributions from companies to help sponsor this bill which made a lot of a difference for me addressing some of those bottlenecks that I was talking about crucial sent over a 112 to 64 gig kits of memory that runs at 3200 megahertz which is awesome for a total of 128 gigs of ram I've posted on Twitter a lot that I've been hitting the wall of what 64 gigs of RAM can actually do for me so this will help alleviate some of that with regards to my video editing and Premiere Pro After Effects and DaVinci Resolve as I've had a lot of issues where I'm starting to use up all of my memory for some of my big 4k 60 projects and things like that and Western Digital WD someone sent over one of their new WD black nvme m2 solid-state drives and this one is a new one it's the SN 750 I believe it is blazing fast I actually did a sponsored video for one of their original WD black nvme SSD that I use as my main boot drive in this machine I did that sponsored video a couple years ago now I was at my I was right when I just moved to my second apartment and they now have this one which is blazing fast sec and even with how I have it set up weird which we'll address in a minute in a minute I'm getting over three gigabytes per second read speeds from it and over to gigabyte per second write speeds to it which is insane and it has a nice clean black PCB and whereas their older one had the standard blue PCB or whatever so it looks really cool it's really nice that memory kit looks pretty cool in the rig as well and helps cuz I do a lot of crazy intense high bitrate recording straight to pro res or to black magics crazy one gigabyte per second data rates for some other footage and I need blazing fast as these and I just needed more nvme drives in general so I also bought an Intel 660 P nvme Drive just as an extra scratch and cache drive which will improve my video editing performance and layton latency and things like that so for the most part thanks to the contributions from crucial and WD and building out in this new case that I picked up on a cyber monday deal I've got a nice silent optimized case that has better air flow it's a lot bigger but that means it's a lot roomier to build because I have a motherboard that's basically e-atx sized which means that the previous build was super cramped and I had a lot of trouble fitting everything in there so I've got a lot more room I've built it nice and quiet and I'm addressing performance concerns I have more memory I have four nvme drives because I used these StarTek UDOT to 2m not to drive sleds which allow me if they're like two and a half inch drive sleds for the m2 SSDs and then I use au dot - 2 m dot or 2 SATA or well it's au dot - a breakout cable that runs to these sleds because my mother word has to you dot two ports which are still pcie-based s-- you know data transfer and so now instead of just the two onboard m dot two slots i have four and that WD black i was really worried about limiting its insane performance with this setup and going from Utah to to that m dot to sled I'm still getting those speeds I was talking about where it's over three gigabytes per second read two gigabyte per second right in st. so that doesn't limit performance whatsoever one issue that I did run into is i modded my previous case the fantex into pro m which was a great case if you want a tempered glass RGB youtuber build which is what I was going for I've never really done a build like that I've always done in these giant monolithic silence cases like I'm going back to and I wanted to try my hand at doing the YouTuber RGB build it was a great case for that but doesn't meet my needs of what I actually wanted from you know this project and there this build for my workstation and so I actually modded the front panel for it because my motherboards have all had USB 3.1 type C headers on them I actually modded it to add a type C port in the front this case doesn't have it I didn't feel like doing that again but my motherboard only has one USB header at all it has a singular USB 3.0 header that I actually broke the pin off of when I first installed the motherboard thankfully Windell over at level one text was a God and helped fix that for me when I was over there a couple months ago and so I have my usb3 head of running to the front panel ports but the front panel also has USB 2.0 which my motherboard doesn't have so I took a ridiculous idea that I had zero expectation that would work I took a USB C 3.1 C header to USB 3 header adapter and Daisy changed it chained it with a USB 3 header to USB 2 header adapter and connected the front panel header into that so two different adapter conversions and I haven't done extensive testing of like throughput throughput and things like that but I have plugged in some flash drives and they all seem to work fine so that crazy conversion down to USB 2 worked out in my favor so now I have more front panel USB ports as well overall the stream went well we chatted for like five hours I took a ridiculously long time I did dust out the old case and I was really chatty and I took my time with it and things like that we hooked up the mine my I 9 79 80 XE to the Noctua in HD 15s which is you know one of the pretty much the best air cooler you can get the V 15 s the D 15 s is slightly tweaked a little bit so that it doesn't block my top GPU slot because my motherboard has so many PCIe slots they get right up up against the cooler that worked out and got everything set up stream went well that I moved it over to my main desk started running my ffmpeg tests which ffmpeg video encoding uses the avx-512 instruction set which is incredibly intense on processors and does more like stress testing to a CPU then Intel's own burn test and ours I don't know if that's officially Intel but then the Intel Burton tests that are used for a lot of benchmarks and my processor was jumping up to t.j.maxx 105 Celsius temperature so we got a quieter we address bottlenecks and but it's not cooler and I'm not getting a better overclock out of it it's been a little while troubleshooting things like that even went to the extent of reseeding my cooler and we're not really getting much better results the only way that I can keep my processor cool is turning down the overclock by a mere 300 megahertz so I was targeting a 3.9 gigahertz overclock and instead I'm now running out of 3.6 gigahertz overclock and that mere 300 megahertz was enough to make the difference between running at 105 C on some cores completely you know overheating and thermal throttling I've never seen this because this CPU thermal throttle then in this specific test all the way down to like the max temperature I hit was 85 86 C running the exact same encoding test three hundred megahertz and we tried under built scene we tried different things this was the only thing that worked for now and this is an all core overclock so at some point I can take the time to figure out which cores i can overclock and which scores i shouldn't and things like that but the silicon lottery is a an evil niche mistress a torturous mistress and I'm pretty sure I just kind of got a turd cuz I've if you remember about a year ago I put out a video about me trying to swap coolers the cool design I'd and ended up with worked worse results and I've kind of done the same thing again except for that time I basically read one review and was like this is probably what I need and jumped in whereas with this cooler not only do I have years of experience with the Noctua D 15 and D 14 knowing that it cools the ridiculously high TDP processors that I've had like my FX 95 90 but I've also read every cooler benchmark in comparison that I could specifically for the CPU where people are getting the I 9 79 80 XE up to four point four gigahertz with this exact same cooler and it beats out just about every other water cooler other than custom loop of course and I'm not doing a custom loop in this machine and so I made a decision based on every available piece of information saying this was the right call and it still didn't work out and I really think my processor is just a turd so I've kind of hit a wall in terms of how far I can push this thing and what I can do with it to keep it cool so for now it's cool it will work it's fine it's stable but the next step is ideally a week or so after recording this I'm going back to level 1 headquarters with Windle he apparently has some delayed and stuff so I'm not comfortable liquid meddling the CPU especially since that's again the the the focus that I make with my workstation computer is that it needs to be stable it needs to be low maintenance it needs to just be set it and forget it and everything a read about liquid metal is you've got to watch out for it moving and shifting and you gotta check Coenen and things like that I'm not doing that so even if it only gets me a few Celsius I am just swapping out the paste underneath the IHS and just deleting it and I think we're going to lap the CPU heatsink the integrated heat spreader the IHS because when we were trying to troubleshoot this I ended up doing a secondary livestream just to some people in my discord trying to like troubleshoot what was going on as far as cooling and things like that my CPU is very clearly concave I believe it's the right one it is very high in the middle and completely not high on the edges and so the cores along the edges of the IHS are what are heating up the most and it's not applying even pressure I receded it I tried a couple different things it is the IHS itself that is not even so I'm gonna go we're going to we're going to laugh at first make sure everything's cool with that laugh at try to get it as even and smooth as possible and then from there we will deal it it a little bit there not a little bit but you know do you let it try to get that little extra bit of performance and then whatever we end up with I will have to settle with and then from there I can go through and experiment with overclocking specific cores and finding which ones I need in that overclock as much and yadda yadda and maybe change specifically the avx-512 overclocked as well so this is part one of what was supposed to be a fairly easy upgrade again I'm fairly happy with the build overall the case is great the parts are great so much so many thanks to crucial for the memory kit and WD for the SSD and super shout out to mr. good hand and hunter and our discord server who helped out in the original stream helped out privately later for me on discord we spent basically 12 hours yesterday just doing all of this working on my computer and they were huge helps thanks so much I will have links to their relevant stuff if required and requested in the description below this is part one the rig is great I haven't sticker bombed it yet I'm gonna wait until I take it apart again and we do the lapping and things like that but the final product will be a pretty pretty freakin beastly build I have like three SATA SSDs for nvme SSDs and a terabyte WD red hard drive in this we've got gigabit networking a beastly USB expansion card I still need to finish my video on gtx 980ti 128 gigs of ram 18 cores 36 threads this is my main workstation PC that I do my 4k 64 K sometimes 8k video production on and does all of my live streaming for my gaming PC on x264 at slow with some of the best quality apex Legends streams people have ever seen on Twitch so turning out pretty cool be quiet case is pretty cool as well that's gonna be it for me for this video I hope you enjoyed hit the like button if you did subscribe for more tech education go check me out on twitch at twitch.tv slash cheapest Hawks we will be doing more PC building live streams maybe even the week that you're seeing this video I'm doing an 80s themed streaming rig and I'll see you in the next videohey there today we're doing something a little different we are rebuilding my main production PC and we're doing it live over on twitch.tv slash a post Vox and by time you watch this video it will have already been done but this is my first time well my first time in like 2 years doing a PC building stream and my first time doing it for my main production PC where you know there's a little bit more stress attached and things like that my it's my trunks PC that was originally purple and green themed and it's been serving me quite well with my Intel Core I 979 ATX II things like that however I've run into some specific bottlenecks I wanted to address as well as the fact that it's in a tiny case with terrible airflow and it's really loud and I want to keep it cooler I'm gonna keep it quieter and I want to do it right for v2 for using it through 2019 eff and wait and a few months to be able to do this project so we're gonna include some bits of the livestream some bits of my thoughts as well as some of thoughts on over a year with the i9 79 80 XE at this point and see how it goes so yeah so the goal with today's project was threefold I wanted to make my computer quieter because I was using a very loud case with a lot of fans it was really obnoxious to deal with especially after I had to move it to my desk I wanted to address some of the bottlenecks and some of the improvements that I wanted to make with regards to performance and memory and things like that I've been talking about RAM limitations that have run into and things like that recently and I wanted to make it cooler and ideally improve the overclock a little bit on my i9 for this we swapped over to the be quiet dark bass 900 case it's orange and black themed which isn't my favorite theme but I'll deal with it my course effects all stayed the same for the most part so on the Asus workstation sage X $2.99 motherboard my Intel Core I 979 ATX II which was provided by Intel a couple years ago I've got my GTX 10 atti graphics card and then I've got the AVerMedia live gamer 4k Elgato 4k 60 Pro and Blackmagic deck link mini recorder 4k capture cards my Mellanox connect decks ooh 10 gig SFP+ network card and then I've got a sonnet Allegro USB 3.1 expansion card but we had two contributions from companies to help sponsor this bill which made a lot of a difference for me addressing some of those bottlenecks that I was talking about crucial sent over a 112 to 64 gig kits of memory that runs at 3200 megahertz which is awesome for a total of 128 gigs of ram I've posted on Twitter a lot that I've been hitting the wall of what 64 gigs of RAM can actually do for me so this will help alleviate some of that with regards to my video editing and Premiere Pro After Effects and DaVinci Resolve as I've had a lot of issues where I'm starting to use up all of my memory for some of my big 4k 60 projects and things like that and Western Digital WD someone sent over one of their new WD black nvme m2 solid-state drives and this one is a new one it's the SN 750 I believe it is blazing fast I actually did a sponsored video for one of their original WD black nvme SSD that I use as my main boot drive in this machine I did that sponsored video a couple years ago now I was at my I was right when I just moved to my second apartment and they now have this one which is blazing fast sec and even with how I have it set up weird which we'll address in a minute in a minute I'm getting over three gigabytes per second read speeds from it and over to gigabyte per second write speeds to it which is insane and it has a nice clean black PCB and whereas their older one had the standard blue PCB or whatever so it looks really cool it's really nice that memory kit looks pretty cool in the rig as well and helps cuz I do a lot of crazy intense high bitrate recording straight to pro res or to black magics crazy one gigabyte per second data rates for some other footage and I need blazing fast as these and I just needed more nvme drives in general so I also bought an Intel 660 P nvme Drive just as an extra scratch and cache drive which will improve my video editing performance and layton latency and things like that so for the most part thanks to the contributions from crucial and WD and building out in this new case that I picked up on a cyber monday deal I've got a nice silent optimized case that has better air flow it's a lot bigger but that means it's a lot roomier to build because I have a motherboard that's basically e-atx sized which means that the previous build was super cramped and I had a lot of trouble fitting everything in there so I've got a lot more room I've built it nice and quiet and I'm addressing performance concerns I have more memory I have four nvme drives because I used these StarTek UDOT to 2m not to drive sleds which allow me if they're like two and a half inch drive sleds for the m2 SSDs and then I use au dot - 2 m dot or 2 SATA or well it's au dot - a breakout cable that runs to these sleds because my mother word has to you dot two ports which are still pcie-based s-- you know data transfer and so now instead of just the two onboard m dot two slots i have four and that WD black i was really worried about limiting its insane performance with this setup and going from Utah to to that m dot to sled I'm still getting those speeds I was talking about where it's over three gigabytes per second read two gigabyte per second right in st. so that doesn't limit performance whatsoever one issue that I did run into is i modded my previous case the fantex into pro m which was a great case if you want a tempered glass RGB youtuber build which is what I was going for I've never really done a build like that I've always done in these giant monolithic silence cases like I'm going back to and I wanted to try my hand at doing the YouTuber RGB build it was a great case for that but doesn't meet my needs of what I actually wanted from you know this project and there this build for my workstation and so I actually modded the front panel for it because my motherboards have all had USB 3.1 type C headers on them I actually modded it to add a type C port in the front this case doesn't have it I didn't feel like doing that again but my motherboard only has one USB header at all it has a singular USB 3.0 header that I actually broke the pin off of when I first installed the motherboard thankfully Windell over at level one text was a God and helped fix that for me when I was over there a couple months ago and so I have my usb3 head of running to the front panel ports but the front panel also has USB 2.0 which my motherboard doesn't have so I took a ridiculous idea that I had zero expectation that would work I took a USB C 3.1 C header to USB 3 header adapter and Daisy changed it chained it with a USB 3 header to USB 2 header adapter and connected the front panel header into that so two different adapter conversions and I haven't done extensive testing of like throughput throughput and things like that but I have plugged in some flash drives and they all seem to work fine so that crazy conversion down to USB 2 worked out in my favor so now I have more front panel USB ports as well overall the stream went well we chatted for like five hours I took a ridiculously long time I did dust out the old case and I was really chatty and I took my time with it and things like that we hooked up the mine my I 9 79 80 XE to the Noctua in HD 15s which is you know one of the pretty much the best air cooler you can get the V 15 s the D 15 s is slightly tweaked a little bit so that it doesn't block my top GPU slot because my motherboard has so many PCIe slots they get right up up against the cooler that worked out and got everything set up stream went well that I moved it over to my main desk started running my ffmpeg tests which ffmpeg video encoding uses the avx-512 instruction set which is incredibly intense on processors and does more like stress testing to a CPU then Intel's own burn test and ours I don't know if that's officially Intel but then the Intel Burton tests that are used for a lot of benchmarks and my processor was jumping up to t.j.maxx 105 Celsius temperature so we got a quieter we address bottlenecks and but it's not cooler and I'm not getting a better overclock out of it it's been a little while troubleshooting things like that even went to the extent of reseeding my cooler and we're not really getting much better results the only way that I can keep my processor cool is turning down the overclock by a mere 300 megahertz so I was targeting a 3.9 gigahertz overclock and instead I'm now running out of 3.6 gigahertz overclock and that mere 300 megahertz was enough to make the difference between running at 105 C on some cores completely you know overheating and thermal throttling I've never seen this because this CPU thermal throttle then in this specific test all the way down to like the max temperature I hit was 85 86 C running the exact same encoding test three hundred megahertz and we tried under built scene we tried different things this was the only thing that worked for now and this is an all core overclock so at some point I can take the time to figure out which cores i can overclock and which scores i shouldn't and things like that but the silicon lottery is a an evil niche mistress a torturous mistress and I'm pretty sure I just kind of got a turd cuz I've if you remember about a year ago I put out a video about me trying to swap coolers the cool design I'd and ended up with worked worse results and I've kind of done the same thing again except for that time I basically read one review and was like this is probably what I need and jumped in whereas with this cooler not only do I have years of experience with the Noctua D 15 and D 14 knowing that it cools the ridiculously high TDP processors that I've had like my FX 95 90 but I've also read every cooler benchmark in comparison that I could specifically for the CPU where people are getting the I 9 79 80 XE up to four point four gigahertz with this exact same cooler and it beats out just about every other water cooler other than custom loop of course and I'm not doing a custom loop in this machine and so I made a decision based on every available piece of information saying this was the right call and it still didn't work out and I really think my processor is just a turd so I've kind of hit a wall in terms of how far I can push this thing and what I can do with it to keep it cool so for now it's cool it will work it's fine it's stable but the next step is ideally a week or so after recording this I'm going back to level 1 headquarters with Windle he apparently has some delayed and stuff so I'm not comfortable liquid meddling the CPU especially since that's again the the the focus that I make with my workstation computer is that it needs to be stable it needs to be low maintenance it needs to just be set it and forget it and everything a read about liquid metal is you've got to watch out for it moving and shifting and you gotta check Coenen and things like that I'm not doing that so even if it only gets me a few Celsius I am just swapping out the paste underneath the IHS and just deleting it and I think we're going to lap the CPU heatsink the integrated heat spreader the IHS because when we were trying to troubleshoot this I ended up doing a secondary livestream just to some people in my discord trying to like troubleshoot what was going on as far as cooling and things like that my CPU is very clearly concave I believe it's the right one it is very high in the middle and completely not high on the edges and so the cores along the edges of the IHS are what are heating up the most and it's not applying even pressure I receded it I tried a couple different things it is the IHS itself that is not even so I'm gonna go we're going to we're going to laugh at first make sure everything's cool with that laugh at try to get it as even and smooth as possible and then from there we will deal it it a little bit there not a little bit but you know do you let it try to get that little extra bit of performance and then whatever we end up with I will have to settle with and then from there I can go through and experiment with overclocking specific cores and finding which ones I need in that overclock as much and yadda yadda and maybe change specifically the avx-512 overclocked as well so this is part one of what was supposed to be a fairly easy upgrade again I'm fairly happy with the build overall the case is great the parts are great so much so many thanks to crucial for the memory kit and WD for the SSD and super shout out to mr. good hand and hunter and our discord server who helped out in the original stream helped out privately later for me on discord we spent basically 12 hours yesterday just doing all of this working on my computer and they were huge helps thanks so much I will have links to their relevant stuff if required and requested in the description below this is part one the rig is great I haven't sticker bombed it yet I'm gonna wait until I take it apart again and we do the lapping and things like that but the final product will be a pretty pretty freakin beastly build I have like three SATA SSDs for nvme SSDs and a terabyte WD red hard drive in this we've got gigabit networking a beastly USB expansion card I still need to finish my video on gtx 980ti 128 gigs of ram 18 cores 36 threads this is my main workstation PC that I do my 4k 64 K sometimes 8k video production on and does all of my live streaming for my gaming PC on x264 at slow with some of the best quality apex Legends streams people have ever seen on Twitch so turning out pretty cool be quiet case is pretty cool as well that's gonna be it for me for this video I hope you enjoyed hit the like button if you did subscribe for more tech education go check me out on twitch at twitch.tv slash cheapest Hawks we will be doing more PC building live streams maybe even the week that you're seeing this video I'm doing an 80s themed streaming rig and I'll see you in the next video\n"