Disabling Intel C-states fixes all my input and stutter problems, but CPU temps become unreasonable.

[Sintek]

Even with aggressive undervolting, my 14700K hits 100C in relatively undemanding games with C-states disabled. Enabling it drops max temps by ~50C. Cooling method makes no difference - I even removed the CPU from my custom loop and threw on a chunky air cooler with no change to temperatures.

Is there a middle ground between the two? I love that input lag is unnoticeable and all stuttering is gone, but OCD does not allow me to live with such high temperatures, whether or not they're "in spec."

14700K
MSI Z790 Tomahawk
32GB C30 6200 DDR5.
7900XTX
48" LG C2 OLED (game optimizer, PC mode, etc.)
Windows 10 Pro x64 (have dual booted Windows 11 and it's the same there)

[MatrixQW]

You shouldn't undervolt anything, you will only make the PC unstable.
They do increase temps but not by that ammount to leave your cpu unusable.
A good case and cooler (not stock) are enough to keep decent temps.
I have them disabled in bios and also have gpu running at turbo boost speed permanently with no problems.

Use HWinfo64 and check CPU C-State Residency.
If it shows all cores C0 with 100% that is the problem and you disabled in Windows the "Processor idle disable" powerplan setting.
Cores should be in C1 and instantly go to C0 when executing code.

[Sintek]

You shouldn't undervolt anything, you will only make the PC unstable.

As long as we're giving unsolicited advice, never use a motherboard's auto voltage settings for vcore or the IMC (vccsa and vccio). The overvoltage leads to excess heat and potential silicon degradation if sustained. Gigabyte is the worst offender when it comes to overvolting - I've seen a Gigabyte board try to cook a 12700 with 1.55v (again, real vcore not vid) which is beyond absurd and why no one should trust everything to auto settings.

[Vocaleyes]

Have you tried manually lowering core clock and disabling boost to get on top of temps?

[Ragerlis]

Set power limits to intel default.

[daemonjax]

That's just a problem with your cooling.

I have a 10700k oc'd to 5.0 GHz 24/7 stable, and Cstates (and package cstates) deeper than 3 are all disabled. Hyperthreading disabled in bios. It's just way easier to get a stable OC this way -- constant voltage and constant clock speed. The only thing I needed to account for is vdroop at max CPU usage for stability.


Temps are great. 26C idle, ambient is ~65F, using windows high performance profile.

But I'm watercooling my CPU.

Going 1 step further...

You can clone the high performance profile, and then modify it to expose additional settings -- in particular, the "disable idle" setting. That pushes my temps up to 35C at idle, so I only use it while gaming.



TLDR: Try water cooling.

[Thatweirdinputlag]

Even with aggressive undervolting, my 14700K hits 100C in relatively undemanding games with C-states disabled. Enabling it drops max temps by ~50C. Cooling method makes no difference - I even removed the CPU from my custom loop and threw on a chunky air cooler with no change to temperatures.

Is there a middle ground between the two? I love that input lag is unnoticeable and all stuttering is gone, but OCD does not allow me to live with such high temperatures, whether or not they're "in spec."

14700K
MSI Z790 Tomahawk
32GB C30 6200 DDR5.
7900XTX
48" LG C2 OLED (game optimizer, PC mode, etc.)
Windows 10 Pro x64 (have dual booted Windows 11 and it's the same there)

That's a high temp to reach. If you have any hardware monitoring program, can you possibly give us a reading of CPU voltages? I suspect that something in your bios is shoving way too much voltage into your CPU. Plus, what does your LLC look like? I'm not sure what it is called on MSI, but on my Asus board its CPU Load Line Calibration. I always found the sweet spot to be around level 3-4, with a little bit of extra undervaloting done on the CPU input voltage side by picking adaptive voltage and using the "-ve sign".