This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/homelab by /u/Humble_Tension7241 on 2025-06-03 04:15:11+00:00.
Saw this on sale just a few weeks ago and went with a bare-bones model. Was a bit concerned after reading quite a bit of online criticism about the thermal performance of the unit and issues across the board.
I can confidently say I am 100% pleased with my purchase and wanted to share my preliminary testing and customization that I made that I think make this a near perfect home lab unit and even a daily driver.
This is a bit lengthy but I tried to format this is a way so that you could skim through, get some hard data points and leave with some value even if you didn't read it. Feel free to skip around to what might be important to you... not that you need my permission anyway lol
First, let's talk specs:
- Intel I9-12900H
- 14 cores
- 6 P-Cores at 5 GHz max boost
- 8 E-Cores at 3.8 GHz max boost
- 20 Threads
- Power Draw
- Base: 45 Watts
- Turbo: 115 Watts
- 64 GB Crucial DDR5 4800MHz RAM
- 6 TB nvme storage
- samsung 990 4TB
- 2x samsung 980 1TB
Initially, I had read and heard quite a bit about the terrible thermal performance. I saw a linus tech tips video about how their were building a bunch of these units out as mobile editing rigs and they mentioned how the thermal paste application was pretty garbage. It just so happened that I had just done a bit of a deep dive and discovered igorslab.de Guy does actual thermal paste research and digs deep into which thermal pastes work the best. If you're curious, best performing thermal past is the "Dow Corning DOWSIL TC-5888" but also impossible to get. All the stuff everybody knows about is leagues behind what is available. Especially at 70+ degrees... which is really the target temp range I think you should be planning to address in a machine packed into this form factor.
I opened up the case and pulled off the CPU cooler and the thermal paste was bone dry (think flakes falling off after a bit of friction with rubbing alcohol and a cotton pad). TERRIBLE. After a bit of research checking out igor's website, I had already bought 3 tubes of "Maxtor CTG10" which is about 14 US dollars for 4 grams, btw (No need to spend 60 dollars for hype and .00003 grams of gamer boy thermal paste). It out performs Thermal Grizzly, Splave PC, Savio, cooler master, Arctic, and if you're in the US, the Chinese variant of Kooling Monster isn't available and so it really is the #1 available option.
To give concrete context here, during testing at 125 watts, both the Dow Corning and maxtor were almost identical at holding ~74.5 degrees with an aio circulating liquid at 20 degrees and cooling a 900 mm2 surface area. The difference between other pastes fell somewhere in between .5-3 degrees C. Not a huge difference but for the price of 14 dollars, better performance, more volume, pasting my 9950x3d, still having left over, pasting the cpu in the ms-01 and still having a bit left. No brainier. Oh and Maxtor CTG10 is apparently supposed to last for 5 years.
Ok, Testing and results.
I first installed ubuntu then installed htop, stress and s-tui as a ui interface to monitor perf and implement 100% all core stress test on the machine.
First I ran stock power setting and Temperature Control Offset (TCC in advanced cpu options in the bios) at default (how many degrees offset from factory that determine when thermal throttling kicks in - higher values = fewer degrees before thermal throttling occurs). I ended the first round at 3 hours and results below were consistent from the first 30 minutes through. Here were my results:
- P-cores
- held steady at between 3200 MHz and 3300 MHz.
- Temps ranging from 75-78
- E-cores
- Steady at 2500-2600 MHz
- Temps ranging from 71-73
Those are pretty good temps for full load. It was clear that I had quite a bit of ceiling.
First test. You can see load, temps and other values.
I went through several iterations of trying to figure out how the advanced cpu settings worked. I don't have photos of the final values as I originally not planning to post but went with what I think are the most optimal setting in my testing:
- TCC: 7 (seven degrees offset from factory default before throttling)
- Power Limit 1: max value at 125000 for full power draw
- Power Limit 2: max value at 125000 for full power draw.
I don't have a photo of the final values unfortunately. This is a reference point. Was in the middle of trying to figure out what I wanted those values to be.
After this, testing looked great. My office was starting to get a bit saturated with heat after about 4-ish hours of stress testing. Up until about an hour in with my final values I was seeing 3500-3600 MHz steady on the P-Cores and about between 2700-2800 MHz on the E-cores. Once the heat saturation was significant enough and P-Core temps started to approach 90 C (after 1 hour), I saw P-Core performance drop to about 3400-3500 MHz. Turning on the AC for about 5 minutes brought that back up to a steady 3500-3600 MHz. I show this in the attached photos.
On the final test, I was really shooting to get core temps on the P-Cores and E-Cores to as close to 85 degrees as possible. For me, I consider this the safe range for full load and anything above 89 is red zone territory. In my testing I never breached more than 90 degrees and this was only for 1-2 cores... even when the office open air was saturated with the heat from my testing. Even at this point, whenever a core would hit 90, it would shortly drop down to 88-89. However, I did notice a linear trend over time that lead me to believe without cooler ambient air, we would eventually climb to 90+ over longer sustained testing at what I imagine would be around the 2-3 hour mark. Personally, I consider this a fantastic result and validation that 99.9% of my real world use case won't hit anywhere near this.
Let's talk final results:
- P-Core Performance
- high-end steady max freq from 3300MHZ to 3600 MHz. Or about 8% increase in performance
- 78 degrees max temp to 85-87 degrees. But fairly steady at 85.
- E-Core Performance
- high-end steady max from 2600 MHz to 2800 MHz. 8%.
- 71-73 to fairly consistent steady temps at 84 degrees and these cores didn't really suffer in warmer ambient temps after the heat saturation in my office like a few of the pcores did.
- System Stability
- No crashes, hangs, or other issues noted. Still browsed the web a bit while testing, installed some updates and poked around the OS without any noticeable latency.
- At one point, I ran an interesting experience where, after my final power setting changes, I put the box right on the grill of my icy cold AC unit while under stress to see if lower temps would allow all core boost to go above 3600 MHz. It did not. Even at 50 degrees and 100% all core util, it just help perfect steady at 3600MHz for the P-cores and 2800 MHz for the E-cores respectively. I just don't think there is enough power to push that higher.
- Heat
- Yes, this little machine does produce heat but nothing compared to my rack mount server with a 5090 and 9950x3d. Those can saturate my office in 15 minutes. It took about 4-5 hours for this little box to make my office warm. And that was with the sun at the end of the day baking my office through my sun facing window at the same time.
- Fan Noise
- Fan noise at idle is super quiet. Under max load it gets loud if it's right next to your face but if you have it on a shelf away from your desk or other ambient noise, it honestly falls to the background. I have zero complaints. It's not as quiet as a mac mini though so do expect some level of noise.
In final testing. This is when heat started to saturate my office and core freq went down to 3500 MHz on the p-cores
After turning on AC for 3-5 minutes we see frequencies go back up and temps go back into a safer range.
Idle temps super low. Nothing running on the system. Fan on but almost silent.
In the middle of a lab/network rebuild... Super messy. No judgment please lol. Here to show the open air exposure on the bottom, top and sides.
In the spirit of transparency, let's chat gaps, blind-spots, and other considerations that my testing didn't cover:
- I DID NOT test before upgrading the thermal paste application. The performance gains noted here come from tweaking the cpu power settings. That being said, reading around, it seems that the thermal paste application from factory is absolute garbage and that just means further performance gains from ground zero with a lower effort change. I don't have any hard data but I feel super comfortable saying that if you swap out the thermal paste and tweak those power settings, I think realistic performance gains are anywhere from 12-18%. This is of course a semi-info...
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