Z97 Sabertooth Making Alert Sound Despite No Issues Found

[Nitruc]

When playing graphically demanding parts of games in 4k I get a high pitched alert sounding noise on my i7 4790K PC through the Asus Sabertooth Z97's mobo.

I originally thought this might be because my SLI'd 980 Tis were using too much power, so I upgraded from a RM850 to a RM1000, and that didn't stop the alert noise.

I then installed an extra bottom case fan in addition to my other 5 fans and my tower cooler... that too didn't stop the noise despite lowering my heat levels even further.

What's strange is nothing seems to be slowing down like its failing when this noise starts and I don't see anything spiking up to dangerous levels when monitoring all my hardware... everything is running great other than some SLI issues in various games that might not fully support it.

Thermal Radar 2 shows my CPU thermal assessment as Excellent and all of my monitoring stats seem normal (unless I'm missing something) as you can see in this CPUID screenshot taken while the alert noise was occurring: http://oi64.tinypic.com/25gzk.jpg

The only two things I've noticed are the VCORE and USB3.1 temps in Thermal Radar are showing as slightly above 60C in red text... but reading other ASUS forum posts made it seem like this was normal for the Z97 and shouldn't cause issues.

At this point I'm ready to just try and turn the alert off since it doesn't seem like anything is wrong and nobody can explain what the issue is on other forums... but I can't even find that option anywhere in the BIOS and I'm not even sure exactly what alert this is for. :/

Can somebody please explain what could be happening here or how I can disable this alert noise?

 

[VirtualLarry]

It's either temp or fan alarm. Could be VRM load / overheating too.

 

[Burpo]

From looking at your picture of hwmonitor I see 2 cores hit 79C maximum, and the TCASE max temp for that CPU is 74.04°C, so maybe that's the alarm you're hearing?

 

[Nitruc]

From looking at your picture of hwmonitor I see 2 cores hit 79C maximum, and the TCASE max temp for that CPU is 74.04°C, so maybe that's the alarm you're hearing?

I thought 79C was still fine and that you just want to stay under 90C with 100C being the danger zone that's going to start causing throttling issues and failures.

So what do I do? I have a new Coolmaster 212 Evo and 5 case fans with 2 little fans added into the mobo... nothing else running like lights or anything fancy. I didn't think overheating would be an issue and really don't want to have to turn anything down considering I'm not running any crazy overclocking settings. :\

Edit: A couple tests I did made it seem like the noise was kicking in right around ~70C core temps. However, other tests I did would make the alarm go off even when still in the low 60s... and it NEVER maxes out above 79.