Overview / Usage

This project is an attempt to house and cool the Core i9 12900K and a high-end Ampere graphics card with 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM. Kicking up well over 600W of performance into the cooling solution, drastic measures must be taken to ensure that our processor and graphics card have a small thermal headroom in the ITX chassis. The central idea of this build is custom liquid cooling with quick-disconnect tubing to an external 280/360/420mm radiator. This way, the machine can be moved and temporarily used at other sites and brought back to the main workstation for maximum cooling performance. The end uses of this machine are with applications of data science and scientific research; however, rendering (such as H.264 encode) will also be used on this machine. I produce videos for courses taught in finance/math curriculums at my university and need a machine to render 4K footage and graphic arts/3D models.

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Other details about how this machine will be built: Nickel-plated EK water blocks (Monoblock for ASUS STRIX Z690-I) installed with liquid metal (Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut) for maximum thermal conductivity above ambient temperatures, 2022 EK radiators with bottom inlet/outlet, Alpha DC-LT 40 pump/radiator combo, EK Waterblock for Nvidia Ampere graphics card, and other cooling hardware. With overclocking, this will be the "fastest" mainstream ITX computer in the world upon completion before the launch of the Intel Core i9 12900KS and Nvidia 3090 Ti. A 3080 Ti has almost as many processors as the 3090, with half the capacity of VRAM. The 3080 Ti matches or exceeds (depending on the bin and overclock) the 3090 for effective speed in most situations (see UserBenchmark Avg. Bench scores), which differs from production or computer applications in need of more VRAM. This makes the 3080 Ti a suitable choice for paramount performance but not the best card for content creation in comparison to the cards with higher VRAM onboard. So far, I have acquired an Intel Core i9 12900K and Nvidia 3080 Ti for this project.

Methodology / Approach

I first learned about the potential of Intel Core processors with my Pentium G3258 and Intel Core i7 4790K. Working with these processors, and supplying adequate cooling, I was able to push the 4790K Devil's Canyon to a 5Ghz all-core overclock. I experimented with liquid metal and a solid 280mm AIO liquid cooler to achieve these results and was able to bench the 4790K to ludicrous single-core performance for its generation hitting scores above 1200 in the first XTU benchmark. I had one of the highest performing processors on UserBenchmark: Asrock Z97 Extreme3 Performance Results - UserBenchmark. It is with this inspiration I pursue this upgrade project.

Throughout the following generations, Intel worked with the community to develop an IHS that was soldered to the die and shaved down to improve thermal conductivity. I am happy to be upgrading to the 12900K and will build my machine around this idea of achieving a solid thermal headroom to push my processor to new heights.

Technologies Used

Intel P/E Cores for Multi-threaded workloads, Intel Thermal Velocity Boost, Intel Extreme Tuning Utility, Intel NVME RAID, DMI, Intel Z690 Chipset, and many other features from Intel will be crucial in executing this project.