SnooPandas2964

Office work? Yes. Gaming? eh..... Perhaps some older games, or newer games at ungodly low resolutions. If gaming is important to you, you really want a dedicated gpu.

Nice. That should be fast enough for most tasks. That gpu ( assuming its the non xt) might struggle at 4k depending on the game, if that matters to you. Good news is GPUs are easy to upgrade if you ever feel you want more.

I'm going to say the same thing I always do, and thats the artic II 240, because its cheap and I have one and it seems to be able to handle just about anything.

Apple is more efficient, but still not more powerful than intels higher end skus.

Is one white by chance?

I wish I had an answer for you. I tend to cheap out on motherboards, I bought the B760 Gigabyte Aorus Elite Ax DDR5 (I know I know, but I had just bought a 4090 and was feeling the pinch.)

And its really been not bad. There's 3 m.2 slots which is not bad, 4 sata ports which is better than none I suppose. Memory overclocking works well. My 5600 cl36 kit is running at 6400 cl30 stable, which is a way bigger overclock than I was ever able to get stable on ddr4. I'm undervolting too, luckily my MB offered a feature to bypass the undervolt protection on b760 boards.

Doesn't seem like there's much performance penalty either. On cinebench 2024 my single thread score is actually slightly above expected ( 132 vs 131) and my multicore is also slightly above expected (2093 vs 2021) but it was a bit lower before the undervolt.

So really the only thing I can't do is overclock the core. Oh well, 5.5ghz all pcore is good enough I say! This board I think was $225 cad or ~$160 US. So overall I'd say I'm satisfied. But next time I might go for a Z board, we'll see.

Anyway sorry for the rant, I'm not saying buy a b760 board, just saying sometimes cheap boards aren't as bad as they might appear, even if they are from a company that has some.... image problems.

So I'd say, buy for the features you want. I mean if you want something that looks fancy looking there's nothing wrong with that. But no point buying something just because its expensive. Oh, and if you want to get some of the fastest ddr5 around, it might best to get a board with 2 slots, instead of 4.

I would personally wouldn't go over 3600. You could even just stick with 3200, its still fast, and really cheap right now.

My 13600k idle power usage was very low. Like less than 10w sometimes.

Desktops aren't getting meteor lake. We have to wait until Arrow lake.

Does it crash with xmp off? if no, then you might have to play around with your voltages and timings to get your memory stable first. Its... kind of common with ddr5. Also, keep an eye on temperatures.

Well i3s and i5s have been around for nearly 15 years now so, that doesn't tell us much. But intel's processors are usually quite good at idle power draw, so generally, a higher tier cpu is going to give you more power for when you need it.

But the 14700k is just as fast in gaming and way cheaper...