It’s actually not a problem. These modern CPUs will boost to high frequencies in the short-term and use quick thermal feedback loops to avoid damage.

The thermal feedback loops are so good that you can even put something like an AMD 5950X into a small case with low airflow and it will automatically adjust the clock rate down to a level it can sustain under load.

Lower temperatures will allow for higher frequencies for longer periods, though, so cooler is better. The potential for damage from excessive temperatures has been greatly exaggerated, though. Unless you’re planning to run the CPU at full load for a decade, it doesn’t really matter. A couple hours of gaming every day (which won’t produce temperatures seen in these synthetic 100% load benchmarks) is basically negligible.

For some perspective: Laptop CPUs routinely hit 90-100C because the fan curves are tuned for quietness. Those CPUs are built on the same processes. Some newer parts like the RAM on RTX3080 and RTX3090 have even higher thermal limits up to 110C. It’s not a big deal.

Higher temps means it will age faster though. I'm not sure of the factor, it's going to be hardware-dependent, so I'm not sure how big of a deal it is.

This is true, but the effect has been exaggerated.

In the consumer world, how often is a CPU pegged to 100% full load across all cores like in these benchmarks? It doesn't happen while gaming. Maybe someone who does video encoding or compiling large projects will spike their CPU usage to 100% for a couple hours per day at most. If a CPU only spends 1-5% of its time at these high temperatures, it doesn't really add up to much over even 5 years. And even if the CPU dies after 5 years, it's really cheap to buy a replacement at that point.

If you're running a server at 100% load 24/7, that's 1-2 orders of magnitude more time spent at the high temperatures. If you need high reliability and the most dependable lifespan for those servers, you'd want to choose a lower clocked CPU. That's one of the reasons why server parts are clocked lower than their consumer counterparts.

> Maybe someone who does video encoding or compiling large projects will spike their CPU usage to 100% for a couple hours per day at most.

Yeah that's sort of my situation, I do some large data conversion (not video but same idea) tasks that do run 24/7, sometimes up to a couple weeks long, but those tasks are infrequent and the box is idle the rest of the time. I do most of it on a Hetzner server that uses an old Intel desktop cpu. CPU has been fine all this time, but they did swap out the memory sticks for me due to suspected errors a while back.

So far it sounds like only AMD supports ECC memory for the desktop processors, and imho that is significant. I'm staying away from home PC's (other than my dinky laptop) but if I were to get one, I'd want ECC.

The last time I checked they didn't support it, they just didn't fuse it off on the die. If you want the reliability off ECC you probably also want that functionality verified and tested unless you are just buying it because it might help and it sounds cool.

I haven't seen any benchmarks how immune to radiation DDR-5 to DDR-4 with ECC is but DDR-5 has a kind of parity check build in.