Building a little project box and checking out 11th gen Intel at the same time. The main driving factors in the decision revolve around the lack of GPU to purchase and wanting to try the new Xe/Iris graphics. To that end, I selected the CPU specifically for the UHD 750 (against availability and price).
i5 11600K w/ Noctua low profile cooler
MSI Z590I MEG Unify
I have not found/decided on the case I want to use for this build, yet. I had in mind something like the InWin Chopin but they don't offer a PSU strong enough for a build of this draw. I rounded out the rest of the build with some items I already had on hand.
Intel 545(?) M.2 SSD
XPG 2x8GB 2667 C16 DDR 4
..and my test bench PSU for the moment. The couple of above items will be replaced shortly. I want to target 29xx+ low latency and a gen4 NVME.
I built her on the motherboard box last night. Wanted to give a few first off and fresh impressions.
It loaded right away into BIOS. XMP profile 1 was on automatically. It also does something called "Game Mode Boost" for the CPU. I didn't have enough time last night to see exactly what that is/does. It did not initially see the M.2 drive (because I put it in the wrong slot), as it requires slot 1 to be populated before slot 2. This particular board will hold (2) M.2 drives on a "riser", and think they both will do gen4.
Right away a couple of things to note. MAKE SURE that the OS usb is absolutely day zero current. I "messed up" the first install and utilized an older USB I have with the OS version that doesn't require you to come up with (3) questions and all that mess. I chased various issues with the M.2 slot, drivers, BSOD, loss of OS(drive) every driver install restart which would bump to BIOS...it was a super duper hassle. As I was loading in mobo drivers there was one sound driver that boinked the sound entirely. I opted to do a fresh and clean install from a current version and (much of) the issue went away...it makes total sense being the motherboard and CPU haven't been on the market long.
I still ended up having to utilize the Intel Driver tool for a couple of small things, I found out that you MUST install the Thunderbolt manager program or it will leave a "USB Device" with no driver in Device Manager. The SSD had to have a firmware update in order to run properly, which seemed to stop the BSOD/loss of OS issue I was having prior. There was also a new BIOS update out already for improvement on microcode and some things to do with i9 CPU, so got that squared away.
I haven't had much time on it yet. I was able to run a couple of super simple benchmarks last night and have to say that I am SUPER impressed with this 11600K single thread performance. In spite of being a 6/12 CPU it nearly keeps up with my 2700X in multi thread bench in CPU-Z. I ran a Cinebench as a stress test. Temps never broke 90C, even with the small Noctua cooler. The stated boost on this one is 4.9 without doing any OC, and I was seeing 4.85 pop up readily in Task Manager. Idle temps I am not sure on yet, but while it was background downloading and I was surfing audio working at the sound driver(s) it was running mid 40C.
Of note, the VRM on this model are quite robust, and they are warm. Not that you would notice once inside a case but they varied from just hot to bordering on painful under load.
I haven't had enough time to form any manner of opinion on the integrated graphics.
I am excited to see what this thing will do...
i5 11600K w/ Noctua low profile cooler
MSI Z590I MEG Unify
I have not found/decided on the case I want to use for this build, yet. I had in mind something like the InWin Chopin but they don't offer a PSU strong enough for a build of this draw. I rounded out the rest of the build with some items I already had on hand.
Intel 545(?) M.2 SSD
XPG 2x8GB 2667 C16 DDR 4
..and my test bench PSU for the moment. The couple of above items will be replaced shortly. I want to target 29xx+ low latency and a gen4 NVME.
I built her on the motherboard box last night. Wanted to give a few first off and fresh impressions.
It loaded right away into BIOS. XMP profile 1 was on automatically. It also does something called "Game Mode Boost" for the CPU. I didn't have enough time last night to see exactly what that is/does. It did not initially see the M.2 drive (because I put it in the wrong slot), as it requires slot 1 to be populated before slot 2. This particular board will hold (2) M.2 drives on a "riser", and think they both will do gen4.
Right away a couple of things to note. MAKE SURE that the OS usb is absolutely day zero current. I "messed up" the first install and utilized an older USB I have with the OS version that doesn't require you to come up with (3) questions and all that mess. I chased various issues with the M.2 slot, drivers, BSOD, loss of OS(drive) every driver install restart which would bump to BIOS...it was a super duper hassle. As I was loading in mobo drivers there was one sound driver that boinked the sound entirely. I opted to do a fresh and clean install from a current version and (much of) the issue went away...it makes total sense being the motherboard and CPU haven't been on the market long.
I still ended up having to utilize the Intel Driver tool for a couple of small things, I found out that you MUST install the Thunderbolt manager program or it will leave a "USB Device" with no driver in Device Manager. The SSD had to have a firmware update in order to run properly, which seemed to stop the BSOD/loss of OS issue I was having prior. There was also a new BIOS update out already for improvement on microcode and some things to do with i9 CPU, so got that squared away.
I haven't had much time on it yet. I was able to run a couple of super simple benchmarks last night and have to say that I am SUPER impressed with this 11600K single thread performance. In spite of being a 6/12 CPU it nearly keeps up with my 2700X in multi thread bench in CPU-Z. I ran a Cinebench as a stress test. Temps never broke 90C, even with the small Noctua cooler. The stated boost on this one is 4.9 without doing any OC, and I was seeing 4.85 pop up readily in Task Manager. Idle temps I am not sure on yet, but while it was background downloading and I was surfing audio working at the sound driver(s) it was running mid 40C.
Of note, the VRM on this model are quite robust, and they are warm. Not that you would notice once inside a case but they varied from just hot to bordering on painful under load.
I haven't had enough time to form any manner of opinion on the integrated graphics.
I am excited to see what this thing will do...