My current 6700k build has been working flawlessly for the last 5 years, I only had to replace the original 2xGTX980 TI SLI by a Vega 64 GPU when I upgraded to Mojave. A week ago, I switched from Clover to Opencore 0.7.7 and went from Catalina to Big Sur, following the excellent Dortania guide.
Considering a hardware upgrade, I fell onto this thread. I spent almost two days reading it from the beginning. Really amazing how it evolved from serious doubts about the possibility of using Alder Lake for Mac OS to huge success. Big thumbs up to all of you, I’m really impressed!
You guys convinced me that Alder Lake was the way to go. This will be my main computer used for software development (C, C++ and Javascript), electronics design and simulation, 3D modelling for printing or CNC cutting. (Almost) no gaming. Multi-threading performance is more important than single core.
The price difference between 12700k and 12900k and between DDR4 and decent DDR5 RAM (5600 CL36) is similar, about 200€/$. For this kind of usage, what do you think is best? 12700k with DDR5 or 12900k with DDR4?
I will re-use the following:
- Vega 64
- NVMe 500Gb Samsung 950 Pro (Windows 10 partition, almost never use it)
- NVMe 2Tb 970 EVO Plus (now my main drive but will be used as data/backup drive due to issues with Monterey)
- 2Tb 860 EVO SATA drive for Time Machine
- USB iTrack Solo for microphone input
- ASUS Xonar U7 MKII USB audio interface
- PCIe Fenvi T919
- Initially a BeQuiet PRO 2 CPU air cooler but I will later re-install my custom water cooling which was removed when I switched to the Vega 64 (I have the water block for the Vega but never found the time to re-install the water cooling)
I will buy:
- Platinum 850W PSU (e.g. Seasonic PRIME TX 850)
- WD SN850 1Tb as main drive
- MoBo
- CPU
- RAM
- CPU water block
Any suggestions for Mobo? (don’t need WiFi, don’t care about audio, 4x M.2 NVME slots)
12700k and DDR5 or 12900k and DDR4?
I am more interested in reliability than raw performance (no overclocking).