I ended up contacting EVGA to see what they have to say in regards to the issue. According to them, the GPU shouldn't have an impact on CPU's behavior directly and it was either a fault with the power supply (which I figured was unlikely) or I managed to bump something during the install, which I can probably believe since the card is a bit of a squeeze; it's about the widest I can fit in the case including the coolant hoses and radiator. Anyways I took the liberty of repositioning the CPU radiator into a push configuration and putting new thermal compound (Arctic Silver 5) on the CPU itself. I also cleaned all the fans/vents and pulled out the front GPU support to open up a bit more airflow, plus it's not really necessary in my case. Though prior to that I actually reset and replaced the CMOS battery and was able to perform about three boot cycles with use and not have any odd behavior. After the cleanup and new compound HWiNFO and the BIOS are reporting roughly 30-35°C for average idle temps. While I still have no idea if my CPU was actually overheating earlier, or what the exact cause of the weirdness was, I think it's safe to say everything is back to normal and I can enjoy this new card without a jet turbine starting up in my room. Might invest in some quieter fans next. 
Hey guys, So I recently decided to upgrade the GPU in my Area 51 R2 to an EVGA RTX 2080 Ti FTW3 Ultra Hybrid. As far as I can tell, the card works great and I haven't had any issues setting it up. However, since the install my CPU fan has been going nuts intermittently. On the first couple of power cycles after the install, the fan would throttle up to near max speed for no apparent reason. Recently idle speeds have calmed down in subsequent cycles, but the CPU fan still throttles up to around 40% speed doing some fairly non-intensive tasks. CPU fan and radiator/pump is stock. Upon further investigation the computer seems to believe the CPU is overheating. Checking the CPU temp in BIOS after the computer has been running for a bit shows the CPU temp at around 60-70°C which is a ridiculous reading for an idle temperature. I installed HWiNFO to monitor this further and the temp reading jumped all the way up to 80°C just by downloading drivers and other trivial tasks, but the air getting pushed out of the CPU radiator isn't even warm. For the record, Command Center's Thermal Controller quick view monitor also seems to think the CPU temp is at around 30°C, which is of course, inconsistent with what BIOS and HWiNFO are telling me (but more believable). I'm kind of at a loss as to what's going on here since my last GPU upgrade; a EVGA GTX 1080 TI SC2 Hybrid from the factory 3-way SLI'd 980s, didn't lead to any sort of weirdness like what's going on now. I don't know what about this GPU or how I may have installed it is causing the CPU temp sensors to report values that are wildly inconsistent with what the computer is actually doing. I suppose an easy solution would be to set HWiNFO to control the CPU fans speeds itself, but I don't want to risk anything if the sensors are still reading high.  Any help will be greatly appreciated. My system: CPU: Intel Core i7-5960XRAM: 32GBGPU: EVGA RTX 2080 Ti FTW3 Ultra HybridPSU: Alienware 1500WMobo: Alienware 0XJKKDBIOS Version: A14OS: Windows 10 Professional
Area-51 R2, GPU upgrade, CPU overheating/false temp readings?