Hi guys,

I used to build PCs and OC them etc but last time I did that was in the mid 2000s. Think AMD Barton/Throughbred time. Anyway, recently at work needed a much more powerful workstation for crunching large amounts of data and the gaming laptops we had in the office were simply not cutting any more. So I thought I could just wing it and put together a system to do the data crunching. A rough outline of the build is

CPU : 7950X
MB : ASROCK X670E PRO
GPU : ASUS RTX4070Ti
SSD 1 : ACER Predator 1TB PCIE4
SSD 2 : ACER Predator 2TB PCIE4
Casing : NZXT H9 Flow
RAM : KINGSTON Fury Beast RGB 64GB (32x2) x 2
PSU : ASUS 1200W
CPU Cooler : NZXT Kraken 360 RGB Black

The PC works out of the box and I am aware of the fundamental behaviour of the newer CPUs where they push power and clock speeds till hit max temp then throttle back but there are a few things that I am unsatisfied about. Hoping to get some pointers here

1) Its not the temperature of the CPU that bothers me, in fact I am expecting it to hit the 90+ deg C level but its how fast it reaches it. I tied the cooler fans and pump speed to the CPU temp so basically once its more than 60 deg C, the fans and pump are running at full tilt. Coolant temp never exceeds 32 deg C but the CPU reaches 90 in a very short time (like not more than 10 seconds). This happens only when I am crunching data. Could it be due to insufficient pressure between the pump and IHS? Or insufficient thermal paste? I just left whatever the came with the cooler on it and just used it.

2) I tried using the Ryzen master to try to come up with a profile. It came up with a -40 profile but once applied, the system would never boot up. So far I used a less aggressive number like -10 and its stable so far. I find that the temps still rocket to 90+ but just not so fast and it can hold all the cores at about 5.450 GHz about 50% longer. is there a detailed guide on how the voltages and clocks relate to each other. Its so confusing relative to 20 years before where it was just FSB x multiplier

3) I have all the RAM running but I can never get it past 4000 MT/s. I know I made the mistake of not making sure the RAM was AMD expo certified. Is it possible to manually push the 4 sticks to at least 5200 speeds?

Just hoping for tips for troubleshooting and if possible any guides for modern system overclocking/tuning. I prefer PDFs to YT videos (old school mah)

Thermal paste OK?

Let me answer one by one

1) The load is typically at least 1-2 hours long
2) It is mostly doing what is the equivalent to render work. Other times it's doing watershed and flooding simulations
3) that data was captured with the CPU facing a 2hp AC unit set to 25°C and the radiator is top mounted with fans blowing out

Cooler is a nzxt kraken z73. Like I said, I am well aware that the CPUs are set to run up to 95 but what I am not used to is the massive delta between the coolant temp and CPU temp. Is it normal for the temperature difference to be so large? I am worried there is a problem with the heat block/pump module that it's not sucking up and transferring heat to the water.

The CPU will slowly increase the clock speed to about 5.2 - 5.5GHz and when it reaches 95°C then the clock speeds drop to around 4.8 and then the cycle starts again. Up then down then up then down. I was hoping to slow down this cyclic behaviour by improving cooling so that it will stay at higher clock speeds longer.
At first I used the TIM that came with the AIO. Then I tried changing the mounting position by rotating it 90° so that the pipes come out from the side and not the bottom. When I did that, I switched to Cooler Master Mastergel Pro V2 as I had some left over. I am actually interested to try the PTM7950 but worried buying fake stuff. Any recomendded sources?