recommendations for I9 13900k motherboard and air cooler

[gjbth]

I have managed to get hold of a Thermalright PS120SE, the base is indeed offset slightly to give more clearance from the NVMe and PCie slot.
I will not be able to check for sure until tomorrow when the Motherboard id delivered.

I have gone with the MSI MAG Z790 DDR5 Tomahawk board. I now have the chance of 64Gb of DDR5 ram at a very low price.
The ram is Corsair Vengeance 16Gb ddr5 dimms 4800mhxz CL40.

Bearing in mind this workstation will not be used for gaming or video viewing at all, purely for work, and I am not trying to squeeze
every last bit of performance out of it. I just need it to be reliable and fast enough for my needs.

Therefore will this memory be suitable for my CAD use, I know its not the fastest available but would I really notice any difference
buying faster Ram.

 

[Tetras]

Therefore will this memory be suitable for my CAD use, I know its not the fastest available but would I really notice any difference
buying faster Ram.

I'd not expect it to have any meaningful impact for work purposes, but it does help if you can find specific benchmarks.

This review has some work apps:

Intel Core i5-13500 Review

The Core i5-13500 is Intel's new $250 offering, packing 14 cores, 20 threads and 35.5 MB cache. This is an interesting CPU that packs the larger L3...

www.techspot.com

As does this:

Core i9 13900K DDR5 7200 MHz (+memory scaling) review

Recently look at the performance differential between DDR5 6000 and 7200 MHz on Raptor-Lake, Intels Gen 13th series processors. Today we review a TeamGroup T-Force Delta 7200 CL34 (!) DDR5 kit to see... Introduction

www.guru3d.com

Impacted:
- Adobe suite
- 7-Zip
- UE5

Not (or not significantly) impacted:
- Blender
- V-Ray
- Davinci Resolve

Puget summary:

"Overall, we see that the Intel platform had a performance difference of 7% from 4400 Mbps to the 6400 Mbps XMP profile, while the AMD platform had a slightly more significant performance difference of 10%. From their max supported frequencies, these were 4% overall. Game Development and Virtual Production were the most sensitive to memory frequency/timings, followed by Photography and Video Editing/Motion Graphics. Rendering was relatively unaffected by memory. While a performance increase of about 5% is a measurable change, it is relatively small compared to the difference in performance when changing or upgrading other primary components such as CPUs or GPUs."

Though, they do also advise that workstation users don't use high speed memory:

While increasing DDR5 memory frequency does positively affect performance on both the Intel i9-13900K and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, the overall gains were relatively small, especially as the frequency was raised beyond the maximum supported memory frequencies of the processors. As we observed above, going outside those frequencies resulted in a performance gain of just 5-7%, with the most benefit to our Unreal Engine benchmarks and virtually none to our Rendering benchmarks.

However, the tradeoff for that increased performance is the potential for decreased system stability. In our experience, attempting to push higher frequencies and lower timings can result in a higher likelihood of Windows BSODs and applications crashing. A great example is what we saw when using the DDR5-6400 RAM on AMD. Although we have seen others use that fast of memory – you can even buy AMD EXPO kits for it – we couldn’t get it to work while running any content creation applications. While this is acceptable for many enthusiasts, as they are more willing to tinker with timings and voltages to get to a point of sufficient stability, as workstation manufacturers, it is not something we can endorse right now if you need your system to be a reliable part of your workflow.

Impact of DDR5 Speed on Content Creation Performance (2023 update)

DDR5 memory has kits rated for up to 8400 Mbps, while desktop CPUs only officially support up to 5600 Mbps. How much does running at official specifications actually impact performance in common content creation applications?

www.pugetsystems.com

 

[gjbth]

Great Info Tetras, thank you.

To me stability is more important than a slight performance increase.
I'll go and buy this memory now.

Thanks again for the help.

 

[gjbth]

I eventually went for two Corsair Vengeance DDR5 5600mhz 32GB kits and these are occupy all four Dimm slots.
I have fitted the Motherboard into the case yet as I am still waiting for the CPU to arrive.

The Thermalright PS120SE does leave the number 1 NVMe slot clear on the Tomahawk board, so that's good.
The actual aluminium dual core cooler on its own leaves the Dimm slots clear as well, but the right hand fan would foul the first two Dimms.
Normally I could just lift the fan up a little for the clearance, but I don't think this case will have the available space once the glass side panel is fitted.
I wouldn't be able to clip it to the other side either as it would foul the large IO heatsink

Does anyone have any experience of running this cooler with just the middle fan installed. The case itself has three 120mm fans in the front drawing in fresh air,
One 120mm exhaust fan at the rear and two 120mm exhaust fans in the top, just above the CPU.
I will not be overclocking the CPU at all, so wondering if I could get away with this. CPU 19 13900K