i9 13900ks, rtx4090strix, is on hand. I would like to overclock cpu and ram, recommendations what motherboard and DDR5 Ram kit to get?

Adrian007 · September 7, 2023

7 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Simple, they don't sell well and when AM5 originally released they didn't offer any benefits. It wasn't till the 1.0.0.7b AGESA did they offer any semblance of an advantage, and even then the performance difference between a tuned 8000 CL36 setup and a much easier and works on every motherboard 6200 CL30 setup is small at best in most workloads. If I were going to be buying a higher end AM5 board now, unless I could find a really good deal on a Gene I'd just be getting a B650E-E Strix or the B650E Taichi Lite depending on if I care enough to bother with ECLK (even that's not super useful), the 1DPC boards just don't matter all that much.

AMD's Gear 2 is more for screenshots and Y-Cruncher scores than it is for actual daily performance, and unless you're more into benchmarking than actually playing games it's just not worth the effort. Again, if I went Ryzen 7000 I'd be going for a Taichi Lite/B650E-E Strix and tuning for somewhere between 6000 and 6400 depending on how good my CPU is, not really bothering with tuning 7200+ other than just quick tests to see if it works, It's just not worth the effort. Same reason why my main Intel rig is running DDR5 7200 rather than DDR5 8000, I can get it there fully stable if I try (I did with my old A die), but they didn't like 7600 without overheating even with a fan (my board and/or 24Gb DIMMs need very high DRAM VDDQ (1.55V+) to get high frequency, and my 24Gb sticks start to roll over with voltage above ~1.4-1.45V), and the performance difference is just not enough to be noticeable other than for screenshots for me to put any more effort into it. There is very much a point of diminishing returns, and a lot of these high settings are past that.

I think I might stick with my intel i9 13900ks, what board do you recommend ?? I would like to go with a AIO for the cpu thoughts ??

RONOTHAN## · September 7, 2023

9 minutes ago, Adrian007 said:

I think I might stick with my intel i9 13900ks, what board do you recommend ?? I would like to go with a AIO for the cpu thoughts ??

I wouldn't really go 13900KS. 14th gen releases in about a month and the 14900K should be better both in terms of clock speed and Memory controller.

As for a board, if you can afford it the Apex is probably the best bet, but it's also completely overkill for a daily system. You would have about the same experience with a Z690 Force for 1/3 the price, but with slightly slower RAM.

As for an AIO, if you're going KS you should really go for a custom loop. A custom loop on a 13900K would outperform a 13900KS on an AIO because the cooling performance is better. If you go 14th gen, it might make sense to go AIO, though we'll have to wait for reviews to see how thermals are on those chips.