Should I back off my Overclock?

the H60 is only a 120mm rad cooler, so it's not going to give you a lot performance especially when oc'ing.  a high end air cooler like the Noctua D14 kicks its butt. 

Prime95 and IBT are really hard on your proc.  they produce unrealistic heat and loads on the proc that you'll never see in any real world applications.  i wouldn't use them for stability testing with your cooling setup.  try Asus RealBench bench mark or Heaven instead. 

reset back to default frequencies and give us your base line temps and voltage vcore.  can you list your system specs for us to help provide tailored advice?  if you've had this system for a while you might need to take the fans off the rad and remove dust from them and the rad.  you might also take the opportunity to remove the heat sink, remove old thermal paste and reapply new.  

once i know your system specs i can offer better oc'ing advice.  a few general practices i employ are:

1) set everything to default frequencies and voltages
2) find my under volt limit for base frequencies by reducing vcore until unstable
3) raise the multiplier for all cores until bsod
4) incrementally raise vcore 1 step at a time until no bsod
5) decide whether or not to continue raising the multiplier and vcore for a higher oc
6) test for stability with the frequency and voltage that appears to be good by running an application that simulates real world usage (REalBench and Heaven are good).   if any instability (bsod, freezes, stuttering, etc.) occurs during the testing, decide whether to add more voltage (up to the manufacturer's recommended limit) or back off the frequency. 

Ivy Bridge is going to run hot, expect to see temps in the 70-80 range under load (gaming), especially with the limited cooling you have.  if your oc is stable you can leave it alone or you can try lowering the voltage in 1 step increments to see how low you can get it stable at with that frequency.  don't use Prime95 or IBT for stability testing, that's why you're seeing 100+degree temps and the cpu is probably throttling down or even shutting down at that point. 

i'd expect most of those procs capable of hitting 4.2GHz @1.2V with adequate cooling.  i wouldn't advise overclocking at all on a stock cooler.  i wouldn't advise you go higher w/o moving to a bigger rad (240mm at least). 




Edited by db188 - 21 May 2016 at 12:45am

how have your temps responded to the lower voltage?

Don't use Heaven for your benchmark if you're OC'ing your cpu by the way. It doesn't stress your CPU to determine stability. Cinebench or ASUS RealBench will work.

Those temps are really high. I've worked with several 3570k's, and I am thinking it's not your OC that is causing everything to run so hot. That H60 is a very slim profile 120mm rad, but it should be able to handle a 4.2ghz 1.25v overclock with no issues. I'm betting that we'll still be seeing high temps even without an OC.

Has it always ran this hot, since day 1? Have you tried cleaning your cpu, reapplying thermal past, reseating the cooler, and also taking some canned air to blow the radiator out?

Don't reseat the CPU. Just unscrew the cpu water block, and clean off the thermal paste on the CPU and the bottom of the block.

Then apply a nice pea size amount in the middle of the CPU, and screw back down the waterblock. No reason to bull the cpu out and reseat it also.

It was not the paste, your block was not sitting correctly on the cpu, by reseating the "block", you fixed that issue, great job

Your temps are great how are they with linx or prime?

Edited by DST4ME - 31 Jul 2016 at 3:39pm