Slow burner. Got all the stuff fitted to the board. Including the 4133 RAM I bought that I realised was stupid at the time. Once Gigabyte sort the RAM overclocking it won't be so stupid. Two days of tearing out the entire innards and doing a much better job of wiring and I got this. The biggest job was sorting the top. I had used the third fan space up there to hide all of the hubs and wiring. So I cleared that out so it's ready to accept 36cm lol. That pesky fan controller remote has now been relocated too. Got to ma's about an hour ago, and.
Started to gather my parts list for my alder lake build, bought corsair Dominator Platinum 32gb chrome for the board when I can afford it I may save some pennies and buy the 12600kf as I'll just be gaming on it, can't belive these cpus have gone up so much.
Just checked. The 12700KF has gone up £15. Dang. They must be popular. Funny, because usually they gouge right at the start. Not a month or so later.
Whent on scan and had a laugh, they have a bundle with the motherboard and 12700k that's more expensive than if you buy separately lol.
Now that the non-K CPUs are official, thought I'd have a look at pricing vs previous gen parts. Scan lists the following: 12400 - £200 11400 - £175 10400 - £170 12100 - £140 10105 - £110 10100 - £120 Not bad considering we're less than 2 hours since the announcement but I would like to see those come down a little. Any discount on those prices and I think I'll be getting a 12100 for my HTPC replacement. Should be a nice upgrade over the 3220T. Also interesting to see both base and max power consumption on Intel's slides. It does make the -T parts seem redundant though (the i5 range can draw up to 74W vs 117W for the non -T parts. That and the -T CPUs have been OEM for years), so the standard parts will do the job nicely for my needs. The big problem is motherboard pricing. Scan only have one ITX B660 board listed. That Asus board is £100 more than the B560 ITX model it replaces - and it's DDR5. That's a problem and it needs to come down, especially when the price delta between the Z590 & Z690 boards is only £40 (and the Z690 board is DDR5). I'm can only hope that it's placeholder pricing as £250 for a B660 board is simply too much.
There will be much cheaper boards than that. Guaranteed. My Z690 Aorus Elite DDR4 was £229. At that price I don't really see why I would have bothered to try for something cheaper with the 12700KF. Tom @ OC3D has a review up. And it's totally not worth going for DDR5.
I agree, but the problem is that I need an ITX board for my HTPC replacement (I have the case already). Gigabyte has a DDR4 ITX board but has excessive RGB and only 1x m.2 slot. With the B560 version of that board being £150 (assuming it's in stock, which it isn't) and the price inflation I'm seeing on Intel chipsets, I wouldn't be surprised if it sells for £200 or more. That's certainly true comparing my Asus mATX Z490 board, the Z690 version is over $100 more than I paid for my board (last April, when it was on clearance and I had to deal with US based scalping of EOL stock). Replacing my parents PC should be a walk in the park though (mATX) so that's something but again there's a premium on the 600 series chipset over the 400 and even the 500. I'm suspicious of Intel here but I don't think motherboard pricing is going to be great.
If you're looking at Alder Lake and have bought an Asus Z690 Hero motherboard, it may contain a defect where the MOSFETs were reversed during installation. They melt and can cause fire.
ROG Strix Z690-A Gaming WiFi D4 ordered as scan has it @£298 almost £20 cheaper than ocuk, may grab a 12600kf for now and see how it goes as I'm just gaming on it.
Sadly the sound card doesn't work in there. I have no idea why, as I tried it off the mining riser and on a ribbon. Strange. RAID works though
Sound card is working. Turns out the SATA power connector on it needs all 5 cables to it. So the molex to sata didn't work.
OK now I am on the PC. Roundup time. I had already pre planned this for weeks and I am glad I did. I also left it as long as I could bear before trying to use it. I was hoping for a newer BIOS, and I got one, two days before I fired it up. First thing was praying it would fire up with my RAM. It's 4133 XMP for two sticks and 4000 for the other two. I assumed (again, wrongly) that it would work on Intel no worries. I assumed the same on Ryzen, I was wrong. Seems I was wrong this time too. People are struggling to get 3600.... Oops. I downloaded the latest BIOS all ready. The PC did start, though it took ages. I would imagine it was trying to XMP the RAM. Any way, I got in. Tried to install the BIOS and got told it was the wrong BIOS, even though it apparently wasn't. Thanks Gigabyte. Before I tried RAID (very useful info on that coming up) I decided to see if my Win 10 install from my previous PC would boot. It did. Downloaded Gigabyte @BIOS, ran a search and apparently the latest BIOS was F5, not F6A. Whatever. Installed that no issues, then shut down in order to set up RAID. This is where it got frustating. RAID. OK, so I spent about an hour in the BIOS looking for the setting to enable it. Nothing. So I went back to the TV and fired up Youtube. Sure enough I found a guy with a guide, running the cheaper version of my board (same BIOS). He had an option I didn't. I looked time and time again but nothing. It just wasn't there. In the end (and it was a miracle) I found that Gigabyte's latest BIOS has a search function. Searched for, IIRC, VMD? and sure enough there it was. Enabled that. Spent about 30 minutes trying to find the RST part, no dice. Shut it down went back in and eventually found it. I enabled it. Then I spent about 30 minutes trying to work out how to build the array. It is not a dedicated separate POST BIOS like days of old. It's all baked into the regular BIOS. Found that, built my array, and was all set to install Windows 11. Then this happened. Another hour of ripping hair. The red herring was TPM. I found it, enabled it, even changed it to 2.0, but still I got that ^. After two hours of digging I couldn't really find anything. I kinda had a suspicion it was Secureboot, but I could not find it in the BIOS. About 30 minutes later I realised I had enabled CSM? is it? to make sure Win 10 worked OK, and that disables the menu for Secureboot. DOH. So I enabled that, went to boot and it wasn't finding any hard drives. However, this was a good sign. It just meant I needed the RST driver. Which, when you download it, is located in a folder called VMD. Installed that, and Win 11 went on flawlessly. Phew. Memory. I was absolutely bricking it. I really thought I had rung the bell by buying stupidly fast RAM last March. Turns out though that Alderlake like Ryzen doesn't like fast RAM. Yet. I had heard people saying they could not even get their 3600 RAM to work at 3600. I started to worry. All this time it was running 2133. So, after I had gotten everything I needed on there to test it for stability I went back to the BIOS and started playing. Tried the auto 3600 setting. PC just kept powering on and off in a loop. Bugger. Had to reset the CMOS. "OK, let's try 3200". Same. By now I was starting to feel a bit sick. Then I thought "balls to it, let's just enable XMP. What could go wrong?" a lot it seems. After about three tries and some training it booted. Woohoo ! got into Windows and got a message "Steam is corrupt and needs to be reinstalled" Uh oh.... Within about 2 minutes it had frozen, then BSOD. BUGGER BUGGER BUGGER. Tried again fruitlessly for 3600 and 3200 only this time manually setting the timings and nothing. So I thought "well, right now the only one that actually did anything was XMP". So I set XMP again. Only this time I went straight back into the BIOS for a sniff. This turned out to be the best idea I had had. Was looking through what the board thought was the correct settings and immediately noticed and issue. It was running the memory at 1.2v. Now I already knew that anything above 2133 meant it needed 1.35. So, I set the voltage manually to 1.35 and? it worked. However, it has defaulted to the second set's 4000. I will take that I have a feeling that maybe the voltage was the issue all along. Windows 11. I like it. There are a few annoying things (like they have hidden delete and a few cut and paste options in a second menu) but I use keyboard shortcuts for that any way. I have mine on dark theme, absolutely love it. Love the central task buttons too. Overclocking. God this is too easy. XTU, 50, done. Overall thoughts. It's fantastic. For so many reasons and not just because of the brute force gaming power. The main thing I am the most pleased with is Z690. Like, my X570 TUF was £20 less. The Z690 has double the NVME slots (all populated and working) Double the USB sockets, a front panel USB C header and god knows what else. I know people have been complaining about Z690 prices but really, they are not bad. Sure, the high end ones are bloody daft, but at £220 this board feels like it's in a completely different league to the AMD one I paid £200 for. Because of all of those sockets I have been able to utilise two 256gb NVME that I could not fit before, and had marked as useless as IMO they are just about big enough for an OS. Or one copy of COD. However, coupled together? more than enough for Windows, sick speeds *and* the 1tb I was using for Windows is now 1tb more storage I can use for games. So it just feels like way more than a CPU and board upgrade, as it has far more IO for stuff. Avoid DDR5, avoid the 12900K, avoid the stupid high end boards and you are laughing.
235 yeah. That's with all P cores at 5ghz and the E cores overclocked and 10 minutes of Cinebench and Heaven. Worst case scenario. I didn't look at the latency. I've just been mad busy.
