Honestly, most haven’t said the way it is, the 14600k and its variants is a 13600k with an overclock, that’s all it is.

In your scenario, where you live, the 13600k costs more because it has the iGPU, which the 14600kf doesn’t.

As for gaming and bottlenecking, you can literally pair a 13600k with a 4090 and have minimal bottleneck when compared to a 13900k.

People still think of these as just i5’s but anyone who has one, will tell you they are way more powerful than what most have traditionally known as an i5.

No matter which way you look at it, there is always a bottleneck one way or another, there’s nothing you can do about that. But what you can do is try your best to ensure you’re more bottlenecked by the GPU, than you are CPU.

In the case of a 13600k/14600k/KF and a 3070 all the way up to about a 4070ti-4080, you will be GPU bottlenecked. So choose whichever suites your budget, either way you’re going to have one hell of a powerful CPU, just decide whether you want/need the iGPU or not.

I personally see the value in the iGPU myself, for that small bit extra in cost, it gives me piece of mind, knowing that if something happens to my GPU, I can still use the iGPU to have a display and troubleshoot, or at least still use the pc while the GPU is getting repaired or replaced.

Honestly, i see little value in spending $150USD more for a Z790, when a Z690 can do for the most part all the same stuff.

All you need to decide on, is do you really care about an additional USB port and do you even have a use for an additional 8x PCIe 4 slot?

Because the DDR5 ram compatibility should be of zero concern to you, considering that the chosen ram is already within spec, not to mention it comes down to the CPU more so to run it, and a 14th Gen IMC is about as good as it gets.

If it was an AMD build, you should be concerned, but your on the totally opposite end of that spectrum for compatibility and with the latest BIOS update on a Z690, you shouldn’t be surprised if you could run even faster ram than its meant to be rated for.

I have the 13600k and have been saying it for ages, this CPU is an absolute beast for the money, it’s literally nothing less than amazing.

For a so called i5 model, it performs nothing like one, I’m fairly sure that this was the very model that caused Intel to officially announce that they were going to use a new model naming scale, because this CPU no longer lined up with what each model was supposed to be capable of.

Even if you pair this thing with a 4090 vs a 13900k and 4090, at 1080p which is the worst case scenario for the CPU, the 13900k only averages about 7% more performance, and lets be honest, the 13900k is just a savage in comparison, so that is seriously high praise for the 13600k for gamers.

I’ve played around lightly with a very basic overclock, which only consisted with nothing more than changing the multiplier so the P cores were at 5.4ghz and the E cores at 4.2ghz, no cache change, no additional voltage or anything fancy, and i gained almost 10% of additional performance in Cinebench straight up.

It just has so much potential, it undervolts more than the i7 and i9, and from what I’ve seen, you can gain up to 20% overall performance through overclocking and bring the P cores to something like 6.1ghz, which is just insane, honestly worth every cent.

Hey, the 13600k is an absolute beast, its completely underestimated by so many, but the ones who did go for it have never complained or been disapointed, and neither will you. It’s really nothing like what has tradationally been considered an i5 model, its gaming performance is almost spot on identical to the 12900k.

And most B760 boards will be perfectly fine, i like mini itx cases so i can only speak from my experience, but i originally put the 13600k in a Strix B660i and it was rock solid, so if your budget allows, i would try get a Strix B760 if you want something guaranteed.

1.418v to me sounds like an ASUS motherboard stock voltage, yeah it’s up there but its by no means in the danger zone, you can run it at that no problem, but lower will just allow it to run cooler and more efficiently.

Theres nothing actually wrong with that voltage, its not necessary, but its also not a problem in the time of ownership you have that CPU. You’ll probably find that voltage is lower on someone elses board for many different reasons, literally a single BIOS version is all it takes for that number to change.

Welcome to Intel 13th Gen my friend, not just any old 13th Gen either, but the hottest consumer CPU that has ever been on the market. This is literally how they are out of the box and it is normal, as long as you’ve made a reasonable attempt to cool it appropriately, which you have by getting a 360mm AIO, then you’ve done your part.

There is of course other ways to reduce temps like undervolting, reducing power limits, disabling multi core enhancement etc, and ideally you should aim to acheive the current performance or more, but trying to get that max temp into the 90’s and no thermal throttle if possible.

But if all you do is gaming, no massive video exports or compression/decompression and so on, then you’ll be fine.