Z790i Edge Wifi, base on CPU capacitors looks 'wet' ?

[carmati158702e2]

I have a 13700K on a z790i Edge Wifi mobo with an AIO watercooler, running completely stock speeds and voltages, I also used Conductonaut to try to minimize the thermal throttling... It was working perfectly for the last month
But over the last few days, my computer has been getting less and less stable, a few days ago it was random hangs when I was playing games, then BSOD's, instant reboots and shutdowns with anything CPU intensive, I updated to the latest BIOS to see if it helped but it didn't, I had to increase various voltages like vcore, cpu aux, vccsa, etc in the BIOS just to keep booting into windows ... and yesterday it finally refused to boot into anything, not even a bootable USB stick
I decided to investigate by disassembling my computer, and when I took off the waterblock, I saw this:

why do the base on some of the capacitors look so wet? it is a bit hard to see in the picture because the wetness makes it shiny,but it definitely is not any stray liquid metal, whatever this fluid is, it is is soaking or staining the PCB and has a dark colour and is slowly evaporating at the edges

 

[RemusM]

I should clarify that I never booted into Windows at that voltage, the effective vcore was 1.2v to 1.35v when it was working properly, and as the system became more unstable I needed higher voltages just to boot into Windows... the 1.45vcore (auto 1.25v + 0.2v offset) was much later when the motherboard had already degraded to the point where nothing was booting at any lower voltages, and even then I only got into the BIOS

OK.
Did you open a ticket with MSI?
Please keep us updated.

 

[citay]

I only clicked on 'Speed Optimizer' that one time to see if it helped in games which do not use the CPU 100% , when it became unstable I immediately set everything back to stock, I was not expecting permanent hardware damage

With a 13700K, no game is CPU-limited, and you cannot make the CPU utilization higher by overclocking. Games in general don't use more than six cores, sometimes eight, and the load is not very high (much lower than in fully multithreaded workload like Cinebench R23 for example). Nowadays, especially with an i7/i9, it makes little sense to overclock the CPU because they run almost at their limit by default, and any OC you make requires higher VCore which quickly makes the power consumption shoot into the sky and makes it uncoolable. So you concentrate more on things like the RAM timings, which are without any such downsides, provided that you test for stability.

Having said that, while it might not have been the wisest thing to attempt an OC, what you experienced then still shouldn't have happened.

But now I realize that relying on 'Auto' can be dangerous as it might suddenly set over 1.5v as has happened

Almost all users tend to keep VCore on Auto, so that is not inherently dangerous. Of course, once the CPU is overclocked, all bets are off. I would open a ticket with MSI and tell them the weird things that went on with your board. I can't say for sure that this is all still under warranty, but that's the logical thing to do now, i'd say.

 

[Svet]

The issue can't be duplicated.
No changes to BIOS been done from XTU.

	Step 1 Enter BIOS	Step 2 Enable Speed Optimizer 2.0	Step 3 Boot to BIOS and check
P-Core Ratio	x35 [Auto]	x55	x35 [Auto]
E-Core Ratio	x35 [Auto]	x43	x35 [Auto]
CPU Core Voltage	1.368V [Adaptive]+ 0.19V Offset	0.882V-1.536V [Auto]+0.02V Offset	1.368V [Adaptive]+ 0.19V Offset
PL1/PL2	288W/288W	225W/225W	288W/288W

Test configuration:
Motherboard: Z790I EDGE WIFI
BIOS: 7E03v14
CPU: i5-13600K
Intel XTU: v7.11.1.5
OS: Win11 Pro
Speed Optimizer 2.0 settings: