Forgive me father for I have sinned....

[albert]

I see what you mean with the Small FFTs. Looking at 77 degrees after 20 minutes on that one. BeQuiets are doing their job well though, even at max speed the noise level is massively less than the stock fans.

[Chaosphere]

The BSODing was caused by the MSI software, it is a well documented problem and clears once a particular piece of software is properly installed. It's not hardware based error codes, it's software related to a driver for the Intel WiFi module. So that problem is completely gone.

That's hilarious, but glad then that you've solved it.

Well I did the default prime95 burn in. I didn't change any parameters but it was sitting at 100% for a few hours in that state with the temp going from 49 up to 55 on average. I can look at small FFT's later. Thanks for the tip. I already had the 9700 up at 5GHz but as I stated before it was over powering on the auto setting, so I aim to try this again but manually tuning the CPU V. Just now it's sitting happy at 1.25v on GameBoost up to about 4.8GHz. In reality no games I've ran so far make the CPU go above 50 degrees. I had my previous mATX board at 1.35 for nearly 5 years with barely a problem. The old  CPU was more often under 40 degrees under load. I understand form my research that the H100i is at it's limit with a 9700K.

100% on monitoring doesn't mean much. There is more to a workload than just how much it saturates the cores, so to speak. One 100% load can be much less intensive than another 100% load, consuming much less power and thus producing much less heat. The standard prime burn test is a pretty poor indicator of stability unless left to run for at least 24 hours, and even then you can pass that and still fail small FFTs in the first 10 minutes.

1.25v is fine, your temperatures will stay nice and low with that, in most things. Your previous mATX board has no bearing on this one. As I have said above the 370/390 boards all have crippled VRMs. Your previous board did not. 1.3-1.35 vcore will not hurt your CPU, but it will make your VRMs run hot, possibly close to their thermal limits. Going above 1.35 will only make things worse, and I do not recommend it! That is why I've advised these voltage limits. It has nothing to do with the 9700, but the motherboard. It aims to keep your VRM temperatures at a reasonable level, hopefully keeping the board running well for years to come.