So, my question is, can someone explain, in layman's terms, what should I be looking at, in whatever various monitoring tools, to check that my system is behaving.
BIOS update tends to be a good idea at the moment. I'd do that first. I then recommend setting power limits, mainly to protect your cooling and to prevent thermal throttling, and later also lowering the voltage to what your individual CPU really needs for full stability. I have described the entire procedure
here. In that thread, the user has a high-end AIO, so he can set high power limits, but for a 240mm AIO, you could try 200W as a starting point.
First you'd set power limits roughly according to what you think your cooling can get rid of - even for long periods of full load - while still keeping the CPU temperature within the 80°C range. Once you set those "test" power limits in the BIOS (explained in the link), you check the resulting temperatures with Cinebench, which creates fully multithreaded conventional load (the highest load that does not come from a stress testing tool like Prime95). If they're mid-80°C, perfect. Above 90°C, you should reduce the limits, below 80°C you can raise the limits if you want, of course it also depends on the noise you want to tolerate, that has to do with the
fan curves. I recommend the highest point of the curve (almost full or full fan speed) at 85° or 90°C. I would try to stay away from the 90°C range CPU temperatures under full load, because that slowly enters thermal throttling territory. It is not good to rely on that, plus you want to have some headroom for higher ambient temperatures.
Then, to reduce the CPU's power draw in all load states, you could look at lowering the setting "CPU Lite Load" to your CPU's needs. Again, i explain that in the thread, also follow the links in there. No need to change the power limits from what you determined though, because those limits only have to do with your cooling capabilities, they don't change once you determined what your cooling can handle. But when you make the CPU draw a bit less power, it will also power-limit-throttle less under full load (if the CPU model natively wants to draw more power than where you set the limits at), and it can boost the clocks a bit higher. This is the beauty of optimizing CPU Lite Load: When done correctly, it will not lower performance, it will actually increase it. Because within the power limits you set, when there's less voltage used for a given frequency, it can then boost higher again. But it has to be checked for stability, and i recommend raising the CPU Lite Load mode one higher than the lowest stable mode for extra stability headroom.
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