*** The Official Alder Lake owners thread ***

[mrk]

Compact and cool!
I got the 64GB RAM installed yesterday, no issues to note. Same timings as the 32GB kit so didn't really change anything other than the voltage which when at 1.35 was being shown as 1.34, not much I know but I upped it to 1.36 and it's now reported at 1.35 so... yeah quirky

 

[mrk]

Try running the CPU-Z cpu stress test, that got mine hotter than all the rest.

Even prime95 Small FFT stress test? That got my 12700K to 91 degrees whereas the CPU-Z and everything else would barely breach 75 degrees!

 

[mrk]

@mrk any idea what wattage you were pulling from the wall running prime?.

Have an MSI ddr4 board incoming, still not sure on CPU but the 12600k is a solid option....see what offers if any on BF.
Need to find a cheap air cooler that's known to fit to set up the board/opsystem outside the case.

I just did some bench runs so your question is nicely timed. Power consumption for CPU Package is 198 watts. Gaming power usage is nowhere near this however.

If you're mostly gaming then 12600k is a no brainer really, hell even the KF if you dont' need the iGPU but if you have productivity to throw about too the 12700 makes sound sense.

Also:

I disabled the C-State sub-option called "CPU Enhanced Halt (C1E)" because some may recall I mentioned a chirping/whining noise in another thread and it turns out it's related to C-State in the BIOS after spending some hours researching the noise and seeing what people came up with online. With C-States enabled people were getting what sounded like whining/coil whine. This is exactly what I'd hear when in the BIOS for example and doing certain things in Windows like playing a video in MPC or leading ROckstar Launcher. Basically any app that makes use of certain CPU instructions.

So I did some playing around and found the whine is completely gone by just disabled that one option under C-States, so the other states can still be made use of by the system. A byproduct of this is that the AIO pump used to chirp when some load was asked from the CPU. I ended up figuring this was related to the whine as the chirp was not there when idle. C1E would level the voltages at sub 1v in this state so it must have been polling the system at various states of normal use resulting in the chirping from the AIO pump as the voltages change since it's connected to the CPU_FAN header.

What this now means is that my idle power usage may increase as a result since the CPU won't throttle down when idle although looking at my HWinfo screen I can see the power usage when idle is still below 10 watts so I guess that's still the same lol:

I've also fine tuned the smartfan curves in the BIOS so the fans are more uniform in flow rate, on the Gigabyte BIOS you can click the rpm shown to get the flow rate of that fan and now both case fans and AIO fans are at 6.0 l/m.

My idle temps have risen a few degrees at 32/33 whereas with C1E enabled it was 28/29. I am fine with that.

Things worth looking at for anyone else who might experience the same.

 

[mrk]

Thermal Grizzly's Kryonaut is what is the king of thermal paste these days. I never heard of it until a mate mentioned it and then I did some research. It's not cheap, but it's pretty much the best.

 

[mrk]

Do you mean at the top of the mobo where you have the standard 8 pin ATX connector from the PSU with an additional 4 pin one next to it? That's the 12v EPS connector and is optional. It's only needed for very high power requirements from say a 2nd GFX card or extreme overclocking. I plugged mine in anyway but will be disconnecting it tonight when I'm fiddling about with the AIO fans.

 

[mrk]

No manual with my Gigabyte board either and their website doesn't even have a manual to download, only a quick start guide and BIOS guide which is seriously annoying as I've had to faff around finding stuff out myself through trial and error lol.

I've done some more tweaking to my build btw, The Freezer II's fans have been disconnected from the in-line cable which connects to the pump and VRM fan, the rad fans are now connected via a Y splitter to the CPU_FAN header on the mobo, and the pump/VRM power cable is connected to the SYS_FAN4_PUMP header on the mobo. I had to use some PWM fan extensions to get these cabled up as Gigabyte decided to put all the non-CPU fan headers right down at the bottom right of the mobo so naturally normal length case fans in a case like the 5000D won't reach without an extension if you cable about tidy cabling.

I also disconnected the EPS 12v connector and left it tucked behind a velcro cable tidy in the event one day I get a new GFX card that requires the extra power (RTX 40 series???).

With this new config I've noticed the idle temps of the CPU have dropped back down to 27/28. I guess it's a combo of the extra EPS connector being disconnected so there's less heat being generated around the CPU by the power regulators, as well as the rad fans being run independently to the pump which has its own stepped speed curve in the BIOS so no longer runs at the same PWM % as the rad fans like it did before when they were all connected to the single AIO connector to the CPU_FAN header.

I may just change the pump's speed to a set constant like 50% only until the CPU hits 70 degrees at which point it ramps up. This keeps the pump running at a constant rate at all other times only speeding up when all cores are maxed.

It's been fun though, been 5 years since I pretty much rebuilt the main PC. Learned a whole bunch of new stuff the last couple of week

Just a side note for all those with a Freezer II that might do the same thing, the VRM fan and pump do not report any speed via PWM, so don't expect to see any RPM readings in BIOS or in any software. You'll know it's working though as you can see the VRM fan spinning through the side panel window.

 

[mrk]

I will not be OCing tbh, don't really see the point when chips nowadays are so powerful at stock. There isn't a single game where all modern flagship chip models are a bottleneck. Even at 1080P we are now GPU bound!

Forze 5, Metro Enhanced, RDR2, Cyberpunk, all of these games for me barely scratch the CPU utilisation and they are multi threaded games that share the workload across all cores.

I'll keep my fans on near passive silent until things change

 

[mrk]

I made a fatal error in mentioning that the additional EPS 12v 4 pin connector on the Z690 mobo is "optional" in another thread. WHilst it is optional on other boards, it seems it is needed on Z690. I was playing Cyberpunk last night and within 20 mins the game just randomly crashed to desktop. I reloaded it again not knowing wtf, then it did the same again within 20 mins.

I then loaded up Forza 5 and the same thing happened in that. I thought maybe it was the BIOS update I did earlier but then realised I had not gamed since disconnecting the EPS 12v connector as all resources I found online pointed it to being an optional power source for those extreme overclocking or those with dual/extra beefy GFX cards. I only have a 2070 Super so figured it's not needed.

After plugging it back in though no more crash to desktop. WIndows Reliability History showed the game crash error related to an "nv" system driver related to hardware. nv being nVidia. Put 2 and 2 together and realised that maybe Z690 does require the extra 4 pins connected up as the power draw is quite high or maybe it's because the Gigabyte boards use a 16+1+2 power phase?

So yeah, keep your EPS 12v connectors plugged in!

Ah!, if you can disconnect the fans from the pump that will let you flip the fans over on the rad from push to pull, meaning if fitted to the front it would suck air in. (through the dust guard).

I don't have the clearance to the MB to fit in the rad/fans to top mount, just room for 2 fans to push air out of the top.

Yup that's exactly how I have mine set up, you don't need to disconnect the fans to do this though, just unscrew the fans, move them as is to the other side of the rad and they become flipped so they are pulling anyway now. Disconnecting the fans from the built in Y splitter allows you to control the fans on their own via the mobo PWM headers which is what I am now doing leaving the pump and VRM fan to be controlled by the AIO Pump header instead.

 

[mrk]

On this Gigabyte board a cold boot results in a delayed activation of the keyboard so I miss the UEFI prompt to press del. Within seconds I'm at the logon screen. I then restart from the logon screen and can now see the prompt and am able to get into the BIOS with the keyboard. It's a few seconds extra time but the simplest way to get into the BIOS in that situation.

 

[mrk]

E cores are not hyperthreaded, only the P cores are. So 8 P cores = 16 threads + 4x E cores = 20 threads total. In task manager each physical P core sits left of the HT core from core 0, P cores start first, the E cores are always the last in the grid.

 

[mrk]

Worth a watch, Board Lives Matter springs to mind

The fact that Asus were shipping to retail channels boards with BIOS versions that were never supposed to leave internal lab testing is eyebrow raising.

 

[mrk]

Hah that will be fun, just remember we don't use jumpers any more to set FSBs and RAM clocks etc

 

[mrk]

The Asus promo page simply states 12th gen CPU, makes no mention of it having to be a retail CPU so I can't imagine this being an issue at all. You can buy OEM CPUs as a retail consumer so it is for all intents and purposes no different to buying a retail.

 

[mrk]

^Arctic mounting kit took 3 days for mine to arrive. Comes from Germany.


Quick question for those on Windows 11. What power plan are you on? I used to have it set to Max Performance ever since Win10 but changed to Balanced today and noticed the CPU now downclocks when idle to 500MHz as expected for efficiency. This kind of compliments my previous BIOS setting change to C1E which when enabled, causes coil whine so turning it off as resulted in BIOS level CPU voltage and freq throttling when idle whereas with the Balanced power plan the OS scheduler will do the same job without the sideffect of coil whine.

I ran CPU-Z bench and Cinebench in Balanced and the scores are the same as Max performance so there seems to be no change in system response.

I like this, in Balanced now the CPU normal use temp has dropped to 26 degrees too.

 

[mrk]

Quick update on Lightroom performance now that I have 64GB and have done a bunch of photoshoots.



Import, 1:1 generation and everything else flies for sure, my custom fan curves means the fans aren't whizzing up and down with each set of instructions sent to the CPU either, just a gradual ramp up to mid rpm then back down to idle rpm. Temps remain in the 60s during the ramped up states then back down to 28 or so.

Seems Lightroom makes ample use of RAM if you feed it! I've seen 27GB used by Photoshop alone just opening 3 short videos to export that don't total even a minute together. Crazy but nice to see RAM being utilised. 24GB utilised just importing and generating previews.

This whole system just feels so much more efficient than the 6700K and 32GB RAM I had before. Still on DDR4 3600MHz of course. What a brilliant and relatively cost effective upgrade for power and silent running efficiency. Props to Intel I have to say.

 

[mrk]

GN's "Most well-rounded CPU" award goes to... 12700K

 

[mrk]

Shout out to the peeps who took one for the team buying an 11th gen

Hiya, I'm one of yours in a couple of days, I've just bought the "special offer" 10700KF OEM and a ROG Strix A ddr4 from a competitor (was out of stock on the overclokers store).
Gonna use my beloved 2x16gb B-die dual rank 3600 cl16.
Anyone has bought one of these 12700K OEM?
How are they running? Made in?

I have no idea what you just said!

 

[mrk]

There's no difference between OEM and retail other than packaging. There's no heatsink included with retail K/KF now anyway. Asus' website doesn't really state you have to buy a retail CPU either. Can't see it being a problem at all as long as you have the mobo serial number and invoice as proof of purchase of cpu/mobo.

 

[mrk]

12700K looks like it's shaping up to the the best all rounder CPU that has ever hit the market now surely. The all round performance is flagship level, the price is low enough for people to consider it over a 12600K and its efficiency is also excellent. What is there not to like at this point?!

I think between 12600K and 12700K, every single usage case scenario is covered really.

 

[mrk]

Yeah I'm just not enabling XMP tbh as manual settings works perfectly fine so am sticking with that.If/when they sort it then I'll maybe switch it on, but until then manual settings gets the XMP speeds anyway. I believe Kitguru said similar whereby even after XMP profiles on their Asus board detected correct everything, only manually setting the voltage seemed to allow the system to be stable. Clearly XMP profiling is a continued issue for various board makers.