Overclocking the i9 9900k, a question

[SaHaRzZz]

So my goal is to get the best performance for primarily gaming, and also doing creative work, while keeping temps below 90~ degrees at stress tests with AVX and everything.

I tested a lot, I won the lottery with my ram, from 3200mhz cl16 I managed to get 3733mhz cl16 stable with memtest86 at 1.45v (could be lower, haven't tested lower yet),

but I think I lost it with the CPU, because it takes 1.365v to get to a stable 5ghz on all cores, and that really heats up quickly to around 100c.

 

Now I'm overclocked at 4.9ghz on all cores, with a surprisingly stable 1.315v and could maybe be stable on even lower than that (hasn't tested yet), which I find weird as to why it consumes so much at 5ghz but meh.

And I'm wondering to myself.. should I leave my i9 9900k on stock if it's not overclocked to 5ghz?

 

Because at stock the cpu can boost to 5ghz on 2 cores, 4.8ghz on 4, and 4.7ghz all around, and I think that maybe I'll benefit more with gaming on that setting? and get better thermals?

Is it like.. go 5ghz or go home kind of thing?

 

When overclocking I was messing around with voltage and LLC, was also setting the uncore to the stock value manually and disabling adaptive voltage on the BLCK, so I think I'm doing it right, not 200% sure though.

[xg32]

i have a 4.3 profile that uses 95w on full load (R20/gaming), and a 165w 4.9 profile, i alternate between the 2 based on work/ambient temps, there's an optimized stock 4.7 135w profile too but i haven't used that for ages, just lost 100mhz on the silicon lottery, i wouldn't mind it too much. There are chips that can do 5.0 and golden chips that can do 5.1, but according to SL, those are the top 5%.