Single core only, for a good few seconds at full whack - if you have the enthusiast-grade cooling

Which sort of defeats whole purpose for >95% of the target market - super loud machines are extremely annoying to everybody, and all non-it (and most it) folks look at them as failed engineering/pc building effort.

I don't think aircooling is going to do it for these – though even watercooling can become loud if stressed. I guess phase-change heat pumps are the logical next step. Peltier cooling is of course totally silent, and enthusiasts dabbled on it already back in the 90s – not sure how common it's these days outside astrophoto imaging rigs. But you can fairly easily get temperature deltas of around 100 kelvin with a Peltier heat pump.

I'd be really worried about condensation with peltier.

Phase change enthusiasts already have to deal with condensation.

Custom loop watercooling (not the all in one kind) and especially, direct die (delidded) cooling, can just about tame the beast. Someone has linked the DerBauer vid where he does it.

Of course, the market for enthusiast stuff like direct die watercooling and KS-series purchasers have a significant overlap <:o)

I have yet to read a review for how-to-build-your-own-pc that recommends water coolers (or more exotic stuff) as risk-free and maintenance-free. I don't mean a year or two.

I run my desktop since... 2018? and didn't have to think about noise, power consumption nor worries about short-circuiting everything, ever. There is no computer in this world power worth losing this (for me, I know I am pretty far from enthusiasts in this).

If you tweak bios settings you can easily do one core at those speeds, or two cores 100Mhz lower, indefinitely without thermal worries.

I have a 12900k and was transcoding video on it yesterday. It stays stable at ~4.5gHz indefinitely when working on all cores.