Surprised you could still use the Noctua NH-U14S for the i7-12700k + i9-12900k. I used that cooler/hs back in the day with a i7-4770k @ 4.5ghz and sure did a great job. However, I upgraded to a NH-D15 with a Corsair 5000X case after upgrading to a i7-10700k as the heatsink for the NH-D15 is literally double the weight and also has twice the fans brilliant fans. Yet, I decided to give a 360mm AIO a go with my i7-10700k to see how it compared and with the case doing a great job having basically no cables in the front & 3 very impressive front case fans doing the job, I had the radiator mounted nicely up the top with the fans pushing the heat upward.
Yet, I decided to go back to the NH-D15 and as I actually wanted to do was use the 360 AIO on my RTX 2080 Ti with the NZXT bracket and a Noctua NF-A9 PWM mounted on the NZXT bracket for the vram. Thats another story, but after upgrading to 338w bios the Asus 2080 Ti was able to perform like it should., and since I have been running 4k for about a decade now, the card and whole PC was a happy beast.
With the radiator mounted at the front it would be super rare for the the GPU corre to hit 40 degrees and even the vram was barely warm to touch. Made for some serious 3DMark scores and with consistent temps being so low the core would hardly move between 2115-2175mhz.
Unfortunately, not sure if it was because the cat ran past my PC and yanked the cable out the back but the card started having issues. So, it was recently time to upgrade.
I bought a i7-12700k, 12gb MSI Suprim X 3080, 2x16gb Corsair Vengeance DDR5 5600mhz and because an almost month wait for Noctua to send a bracket to make it fit with the 1700 socket I put the 360mm Thermaltake AIO I had on the 2080 Ti on and was certainly doing great. But I actually prefer the NH-D15 for a few reasons.
I think due to my case having no obstructions, the Noctua NH-D15 being in there has actually made both my ram and GPU cooler. With such a massive heatsink when running how your guide was done with say 5.0ghz P-all cores and 4.0 e-all cores with a MSI z690 Edge Wifi and my setup, the max temp I got was 81c on P-core 5. This is with my fan profiles ramping up as temp does and not max all the time. IIt seems the massive heatsink and decent airflow coming in, when not gaming and running my GPU at 2160mhz, DDR5 @ 5800mhz, Cores at 5.1 and 4.1 etc. I'd like to just say AIO are great but heck, when all the components are dialed in nicely, it's time to get a NH-D15 and spend some time in the bios getting your OC right.
