H150i Elite Capillex Coolant temps high

[xaeret]

never had any issues with my coolant before, while playing starfield today my rgb lights all went red... when i went to icue my coolant temp reached 56 degrees, immediately shut down the game and boosted my coolant hose to extreme. temps went down to 45, but sitting at 45. normal temps while idle was 26-32 before this.

 

any ideas? do i need to reapply thermal paste or is there a blockage somewhere? airflow is good, how could i check for a blockage in the rad?

[c-attack]

Not TIM and no need to repaste. If there is any type of heat transfer issue, you get terrible, erratic cpu temps, but the coolant temp won’t budge because that heat is not being efficient transferred into liquid stream. 
 

56C is too high and a clear warning. The complication is if you are really hammering the GPU with extended load on a large TDP GPU, you can heat the case up quite a bit. So to test for a blockage, run a cpu only test so ambient temp is not a factor. You can use anything, but the CPU-Z “stress” test under the bench tab is a good one if you think you might have a problem. It is linear and not max watts so you should not see max cpu temps or a large coolant shift in a working system. 
 

Run the test for 10 min. Watch the coolant temp. You didn’t mention your cpu model, but for most the test will consume around 200W depending on bios settings and that will equate to +6C in 10 min. If you see the coolant go +10C in 2 minutes, stop the test. That will indicate a blockage or other flow issue. Contact Support. If you do have a flow issue, it’s not going to cool down either. You’ll be able to use the pc for light duty, but essentially it’s not taking the heat to the radiator so the temp will steadily rise every minute you are up and running.