Discussion Alder Lake - Builders Thread

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AdamK47

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
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This thread is for those of us that own or are looking to get an Alder Lake CPU.

Bought mine on release day. 12900K. Memory selection was limited to only Crucial DDR5 4800 at the Micro Center I went to. Bought two 2 x 8GB kits. Motherboard is a Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Master. I did buy a 360mm Lian Li Galahad 360mm AIO. Ended up returning it since the Lian Li Socket 1700 backplate that I bought separately worked well with my NZXT Kraken X73.

46RRrSN.jpg
 
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AdamK47

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
15,171
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What are the temps and power usage during Prime95?

GB5, if you don't mind please.

Not sure about power usage. I'd have to go back and check. Prime95 4K FFT with 24GB of memory allocated has the top core sitting just at 90C. That's the worst case torture test I have. Of course normal gaming is much lower with a core topping out somewhere in the upper 60s. The same 4K FFT test would hit 100C and throttle on the 12900K. This even with the 12900KS at 5.3GHz and the 12900K at 5.1GHz.
 

JoeRambo

Golden Member
Jun 13, 2013
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Alder Lake had some interesting behavior with AVX clocks, i think i saw Igor claiming it was limiting it to 5Ghz or so, i wonder if that is still the case with 12900KS, HwInfo64 should show effective clocks nicely.
 

AdamK47

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
15,171
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Alder Lake had some interesting behavior with AVX clocks, i think i saw Igor claiming it was limiting it to 5Ghz or so, i wonder if that is still the case with 12900KS, HwInfo64 should show effective clocks nicely.
It does deal with AVX loads differently. It can be overridden in the BIOS to tell it to have an offset of 0. I keep it at default. At 5.3GHz it will offset the full PCore to 5.0GHz. I turn AVX off in Prime95 for the all 5.3GHz 4K FFT 24GB test. I just looked at the current running test. Seeing around 300W with this test. This is the same wattage when I run it with AVX and it down clocks the PCores to 5.0GHz.
 
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AdamK47

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
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Ran AIDA64 earlier for a few hours. More of a realistic high level load. I'm going to be "that guy" and show a camera photo of it instead of a screenshot.

2N7klul.jpg


Around 250W. Temps do spike into the low 90s every once and a while.
 
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AdamK47

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
15,171
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Played around with the CPU some more today. Tried enabling "Enhanced multi-core performance mode" on my Gigabyte Z690 Master motherboard. Left all other CPU settings at default including voltage and LLC.

The setting is the cheat setting that a lot of motherboard makers like to have enabled by default. It makes the CPU run at its highest turbo at all times. My motherboard did not have it enabled by default. I decided to try it.

The 12900KS has a new feature called "Enhanced TVB". The combination of the setting I just mentioned and Enhanced TVB introduced interesting results. In the BIOS it will show it's running at 5.5GHz at 1.48V. In Windows I don't ever see it running at that. At idle all cores sit at 5.4GHz with 1.4V. On light workloads it will maintain 5.4GHz. Doesn't matter how many cores are used. If it doesn't push the CPU too much it stays at 5.4GHz. It will sit at 5.3GHz all cores with 1.334V using heavier loads. AIDA64 stress test will do this. At even heavier loads, like Prime95 4K non-AVX, it will cause the CPU to bounce between 5.1GHz and 5.3GHz. And of course, AVX loads cause the CPU to go down to 5GHz all core.

The good thing so far is that everything appears to be stable. Ran several tests today. Going to try out some gaming and see if 5.4GHz all core holds.
 

coercitiv

Diamond Member
Jan 24, 2014
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I've always been weary of using MC or even XMP for that matter. You never know what voltages get changed when enabling these options, case in point I had a MSI Z370 board set a ridiculous VCCSA just because I had a DDR4 4000 kit installed.

Since the 12900KS has a factory defined voltage curve up to 5500Mhz, I would rather just manually set an 8-core turbo of 5.4Ghz and then check on Vcore and temps, maybe optimize LLC and AC/DC Loadline lower temps or stability if need be. I'd rather finetune or solve my own mess than search all over the UEFI for obscure "automated" changes.
 

AdamK47

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
15,171
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In my case a stable 5.4GHz overclock is not possible with voltage and LLC tweaks. With multi-core enhancement I can get at least 5.3GHz while bumping to 5.4GHz as Enhanced TVB allows it. With "enhanced multi-core performance mode" enabled, the voltage and LLC settings are not increased.
 
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