I have 96GB 6800 CL34. XMP no problemo runs on first boot (14900K, Asrock Z790 LiveMixer). Even tried to push it a bit to 7200 with lower timings but I have to spend more time on it.

Maybe. But a 240mm AIO has no advantages over a good air-cooler, and all the downsides of an AIO. Eg. pointless.

My 14900k does 40k in cinebench r23 on 240W powerlimit :P Aint no 13900k coming remotely close to that.

Idle usage of all of them (even the 14900k) is really really low, like below 5 Watt. And of any of the CPU’s (even 14900K), you can just set the TDP (PL1 & PL2) to whatever you want. Obviously it’s slower at lower TDP. A non-K cpu is just equal to a K cpu but it has different (lower) default settings for the TDP. You are fully in control of how hot and fast the CPU is (under load).

For gaming, an AMD CPU usually generates higher FPS for the same TDP. Something like a 7800x3d is pretty efficient.

No, undervolting improves performance. It will *always* consume to what you set the TDP. So, by lowering the TDP and then undervolting, you can keep the same performance at lower TDP (and that’s a lot more than 5W for a 100mV under-volt).

I’ve been looking at the Intel meteor lake reviews since it came out and everyone seems to be hating it.

Wrong. First of all Meteor Lake didn’t come out yet and there are no reviews of it, so you are fully mistaken here. 14th gen desktop is Raptor Lake Refresh, and everyone that doesn’t own one hates it but the people that do own one love it. My 14900K does 6GHz at more than 100mV less than a 13900K/KS would.

Yes, Dell XPS sucks (regarding performance) and always did. It’s a thin-and-light laptop. The one I got has a 3050Ti with a TDP of 35W… It performance is slightly over half the 2060 of my Dell G3 (where GPU gets 70W). XPS is hot and slow. But its light and compact. Physics…

By far the most important is that it has a coolant temperature sensor and does fan control based on the coolant/water temperature and not the actual CPU temperature. CPU temperature will fluctuate a load depending on load, but coolant will take a long time to get to equilibrium. If you get an AIO without coolant sensor, you’ll get annoying very rapid fluctuating and high fan speeds, even when coolant is ‘cold’.

From a technical point of view I don’t understand the purpose of a heatpipe on an M.2 heatsink. Isn’t the purpose of a heatpipe to transport heat from a point (source) of high density to another point where it can be dissipated (eg. where there is space for a large surface area fin-stack).

But this transports heats to an exact same area size ‘finstack’ as could be placed directly on the SSD without heatpipe. You could just as well put the ‘top heatspreader’ (what they call it) directly onto the SSD. Maybe it would only have a bit less thermal mass. Is that the point? Adding thermal mass?

Or not. I feel this is just adding heatpipe for the sake of adding heatpipe.

Ehm, yes it does. He has performance maximizer installed which runs on a partition on his drive. His computer tries to boot this partition but performance maximizer doesn’t support his CPU.

A 240 does NOT handle 250Watt… Where’d you read that? Maybe with some push-pull fan combination at jet-power noise levels.

YES you should enable powerlimits. Jeez. Just set some sane settings like PL1=220W, PL2=200W and tau=30 seconds. This is what the motherboard does anyway if you just set ‘cooler’ to 240mm (most motherboard have these options). They’ll only enable 250 or unlimited once you set cooler to 360 or more. You might lose 5% performance OMG (and 0% in actual real-world gaming). You regain the performance and then some once you apply an undervolt of 50mV or whatever you can do, and then it’ll run cool and quiet.

I’m doing most games on 80W-100W on my 14900k (combined with 3080Ti at 3840x1600). And that’s with powerlimits of 253W.

Red Dead Redemption 2, Battlefield, Cities Skylines. It’s a non-issue.

I have a Logitech UltraX keyboard in use with my primary computer. Has to be 20 years old.

I have a Firewire PCIe card and a Focusrite Saffire Pro audio interface. Think I got that in 2011.

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I think it’s mostly interesting to hear what very old hardware people have in use with/as their primary PC than as a secondary PC, router, NAS, etc. I think we all shift our old hardware to those tasks.