the intel i912 900k is one of the most powerful cpus you can buy and today we're gonna do
everything in our power to change that but before we strap the i9 into our crudely built
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as always before we whip out the bamboo orifice poking we need a good baseline
now for our baseline we're starting off with the new nzxt n7 z690 motherboard nzxt sent one
over for a video and i was like this is a perfect opportunity to use it this n7 should have a good
enough power delivery to get a solid baseline performance reading out of the 12 900k and then
we're also going to be using a dual channel kit 16 gigs of ddr4 running at 3600 megahertz
and the aio is real beefy it's a 360 millimeter corsair aio which should again be able to handle
the 12 900k well and then finally in terms of the graphics card we're using a 3080 ti
just so that we you know push the 12 900k to the limit now straight off the bat we have quite
a happy cpu it's drawing about 130 watts it's relatively cool it's not having to work too hard
and we're getting a core frequency of about 4.9 gigahertz and it's all running very well which
honestly i don't really like the look of so let's start the first phase of our kneecapping
now the first torture prong we're going to use for today's video is going to be to
swap the motherboard out to something a bit less appropriate and i think this is a good bet which
is the loseriest looking lga 1700 motherboard i could find and it's an asus prime h610m
now for a little loser motherboard despite the lack of cooling
it actually doesn't have the worst looking power delivery we've still got eight phases
so let's drop that cpu in here and see what just the motherboard change does to the performance
okay so now we've got it installed in what i like to call the one some high-end components in a
giveaway configuration so let's see what this does now i have barely been playing and we're
already seeing the cpu throttle quite aggressively see it it jumps between 3.2 and 4.9 gigahertz
so yeah i don't think that power delivery is having a particularly good time at the moment
although i have an idea because well i haven't had a fan blowing onto the power delivery which
is a bit unfair considering that we're using an aio we don't have like an air cooler blowing
onto the power delivery so let's give it a bit of airflow and see how much that helps
whoa it's immediately stopped throttling the moment i aimed the fan onto the power
delivery it just stopped slowing down so moral of the story is have just a bit of
active airflow over the power delivery on your motherboard now we don't want to fix
it so we are going to remove the fan for the rest of the testing just to really
just to really pile on and now with the motherboard crapified let's do the ram
i think dropping our ram speeds from 3 200 megahertz which is the fastest dram speed
supported by h610 motherboards down to 2133 megahertz is a good place to start when it
comes to our ram kneecapping just so that we can see how 12th gen intel responds to sub-optimal
memory configurations oh damn we're really starting to lose frame rate now now despite
the reasonable reduction in average frame rate going to 2133 megahertz on the memory but what
i find the most interesting about these results is that the one percent lows didn't change much
going from 3200 megahertz to 2133 megahertz which is unusual usually when you start
screwing with the cpu's memory configuration the one percent lows are where you see a big
difference so i find that pretty interesting it seems like the 12 900k does not like you messing
with its memory configuration and at this point i think the next step is probably very predictable
there we go that should do the trick whoa 12th gen intel does not like it some pre-built memory
configuration at all we've lost a lot of frame rate now just remember earlier in the video we
were well over 200 frames per second and now we're we're not anymore um yeah the same this
ain't going great and obviously the fact that we've lost half our ram doesn't help either
so clearly memory bandwidth is extremely important when it comes to 12th gen intel
cpus um so let's take it even further so with this little h610 motherboard for some reason
you have the option to drop the ram speed down to 800 megahertz which is solid ddr2 territory
so let's do that a few moments later okay never mind apparently the motherboard's a liar because
the slowest speed i could get to boot was 1333 megahertz again for some reason so let's use that
damn it's actually getting kind of sad now the 12 900k and 3080 ti have been
pretty effectively neutered at this point we just have about 25 of the performance left
that we started with and remember we haven't even switched any cores off on the cpu
in fact the motherboard's power delivery isn't even overheating anymore this is
all just due to memory configuration and at this point there's just one thing left i want to try
now unfortunately i don't have any terrible coolers that mount to lga 1700s so we are
gonna have to improvise a little bit here but luckily gravity is socket agnostic which does
help quite a bit and that is why i'm going to use this little athlon cooler yes look at
that it does not have any particularly obtrusive mounting which means we can just kind of rested
on the cpu like that and obviously we'll make sure that there's there's decent contact with thermal
paste and stuff but we'll just rest it on there like that and then hope that nothing explodes
nice now we've got the full-blown dowel configuration going i'm using noctua nth2
which behaves quite similarly to super glue in fact and i've also removed the mounting hardware
so that nothing touches anything metal um yeah i think that's going to be okay
oof that hit 100 real fast yeah come on at least throttle like just do something to try
and prevent catastrophe maybe i don't know i'm confused why is it running if anything
better than it was with the better cooler like what is going on the 12 900k is like yeah yeah
no no no do you know what what situation i really thrive under a hundred degrees celsius like what
it's been a while now and it's just fine the 12 900k is running like there's nothing wrong
i don't know why i keep being surprised by how unphased intel cpus are running just pegged at
100 degrees celsius apparently they were designed to run on mercury with no problem
uh the planet not the metal and with that over the course of this video we've seen
quite the regression of performance going from the base configuration all the way to the dowel
configuration most if not all of which was due to the memory which just shows if you've got a
12th gen intel cpu give it a decent memory configuration otherwise you're going to pay
the price which brings me neatly to the end of the 12 900k bamboo orifice poking if you
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