Coolant temp hit 60C in game, but not repeatable

[Gessler555]

I'm on a new 14700K build that I put together just about a month ago and I was playing Battlefield 2042 with the CPU sitting at around ~55C when all of a sudden all my RGB started flashing red & all fans kicked up to a 100%. I saw that iCUE had given a notification saying overheating detected & that it was operating in failsafe mode. Sure enough, I saw that the coolant in my LINK H150i RGB had hit 60C in the red, which is what I assume triggered the failsafe.

This was 2 days ago. But since then I've run several 30-minute Cinebench R23 runs, and sat in several 45min-1 hour gaming sessions in BF2042 and the coolant always stabilizes around the 43-44C mark in both types of workloads (I guess the heat dumped by my 1080Ti compensates for the lower CPU temps in gaming compared to Cinebench, ending up with similar coolant temp equilibrium in both cases). This is consistent with the coolant temps I got back when I first built the rig. I'm in a 26C air-conditioned room with 3x front intake QXs and 3x AIO QXs exhausting up top all set to Balanced & pump set to Quiet. Stock 120mm that I got with my 5000D case is on rear exhaust plugged into CHA_FAN on STRIX Z790-E Gaming WiFi II.

So far, I'm unable to recreate this overheating event and I'm not able to figure out what caused it in the first place. Worth mentioning, I've had iCUE trigger failsafe once before, when I was running AIDA64 stress test. But when I ran that test, the fans did not spin up to a higher rpm which is what they do whenever CPU goes under load & package temp begins to climb. It sat in the test for a few minutes then triggered the failsafe.

I assumed this was because of some kind of conflict between AIDA & iCUE that led to the fans continuing to sit at idle speeds (~400rpm) which led to coolant overheating as a result. Note that I didn't see the coolant temp graph back then so not sure if that was indeed the issue that triggered failsafe but I assume it was.

However I did not have any other monitoring software running during the latest failsafe event which was during a game (Armoury Crate was not in the system tray but some elements of it are always running in the background as reported by Task Manager). I had headphones on so couldn't tell if the fans had spun down to idle at some point during gameplay before the failsafe kicked them to 100%.

Interestingly, on both the occasions when the failsafe triggered, when I opened iCUE to see what's happening I noticed that the little sensor widget (that reports CPU, GPU temps, voltage etc) that shows up on the bottom left of iCUE homescreen had disappeared. I don't know if this was evidence that something happened that led to iCUE losing all sensor inputs that in turn may have led to fans spinning down. I hadn't checked the dedicated Dashboard tab though, just the little monitoring panel on homescreen.

What's going on and what should I do next?

PS. I'm not sure what version of iCUE I was on during the AIDA test event but the latest failsafe event was on 5.15

I have since updated to 5.16