With that being said, I acknowledge that I am just making an assumption. Have you noticed any difference outside of benchmarks? I am not looking to go higher in speeds because I have seen videos (e.g. from Buildzoid) talking about how awful the 13th gen memory controller is, so I figured I am not really looking to gamble my time and money on max performance RAM.

Currently running a 12900k with DDR4 RAM.

When I checked the benchmarks, DDR4 ended up being about 3% slower than the fastest DDR5 which was more than double the price, which for 64Gb was a significant price increase. Even less difference for gaming, something like 1%.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-12900k-alde...

I'm sure it's a similar story for the different speeds of DDR5. The price premium isn't worth the tiny increase in speed. I guess people see the big numbers like 4800 vs 5600 and assume that means it's that much faster, 17%, when in reality it's something like 1-2%.

Faster RAM has always been a ripoff, and like you said you're risking stability issues. https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/ddr5_core_i9_13900k_dd...

What motherboard are you using for your 12th gen? It's honestly been the most difficult part of piecing together my build. It seems like all the decent motherboards are plagued with one or more issues e.g. poor VRMs, poor bios/supporting software [1], NIC disconnects randomly [2], coil whine, etc..

I'll admit, I have only seen benchmarks for DDR5 in regards to games which was not impressive. It's disappoint to see that other applications would only have a greater performance of around 3%. Maybe I will just go with DDR4 then...

[1] I have heard Gigabyte boards have a hell of a time getting RBG Fusion 2.0 to work/save settings.

[2] I have also read to stay far away from boards with Intel's I225/226 NICs or to get a secondary NIC.

Can't comment on RGB stuff because mine's in a closed black box.

Not sure what NIC it has... specs online say "Intel 2.5GbE LAN chip", my router is only 1Gb but it works fine, no disconnects. PC is Windows only though.

I've mostly had Gigabytes over the years (some Asus as well), and haven't had a lemon motherboard yet, maybe I've been lucky. But I am pretty demanding and don't tolerate faulty stuff well.

I'm also quite annoyed by noise, system is set up to be as quiet as possible with passive PSU/140mm fans/etc. Haven't noticed any coil whine.

Why haven't you undervolted the cpu with all your interest for noise?

Ah I'm less lucky: ASUS Prime B650-Plus mobo and the link says that on the Gamer Nexus forum (?) it could be a problem with ASUS motherboards.

> Why haven't you undervolted the cpu with all your interest for noise?

Honestly I'm not too sure how to do that. I never bother overclocking/underclocking. I like everything stock. I thought running DDR5-6000 from the QVL list in EXPO mode was also something really normal to do.

Quite simple, I always undervolt AMD hardware as they tend to consistently exxagerate on that, gpus too.

https://youtu.be/1pizvaYiVbk

Normal people don't read QVL lists (they wouldn't even know what a QVL is) nor go into the BIOS to overclock RAM (yes, EXPO is overclocking).

Bah, I have clearly been running my fans too hard. Using stock configuration, my 65W CPU idles in the low 40Cs with slightly audible fan noise. If I disable/super-slow RPM until 45/50 C, presumably that would be completely fine, and give me a near silent build. Obvious in retrospect.

Is that a feature of a particular desktop or did you write a custom daemon to check on which desktop you are currently? I know that KDE has the concept of activities, which is an even different concept than virtual desktop and would be interesting in that regard.