I'm almost finished with the tests. Last night I got hooked on Counter Strike Source, which I know isn't the greatest, but it's been my first game on a decent PC in many years. Playing at 200fps with everything maxed out and an integrated GPU isn't bad at all, even though it's a pretty old game.\nApart from that, I've significantly reduced the noise by modifying the temperature/rpm profile from the BIOS as
@Sylver suggested. Now I can see in more detail that the temperature spikes when the memory test starts, reaching 85°C (for me it's an excessive temperature but not dangerous). On the other hand, the moment the multithreading starts, the temperature drops. I see the same behavior with other programs. For example, when the Steam client demands power from a single core and the rest is at rest, it also heats up quite a bit and with Firefox it's the same. But when I start a demanding game (eg: Counter-Strike 2), the temperature drops again quite a bit.\nThe profile stays this way, unless you tell me that it's not advisable to get close to 90°C even occasionally.\nThere's another thing happening to me: when I activate the EXPO or XMP profile of the memory, it seems that SMT is deactivated. From the HL benchmark I see that the performance of the memory test doubles its result while the pure CPU tests remain more or less the same. I think it's not normal that SMT is deactivated but as I don't see any penalty in CPU performance and the memory improves quite a bit, for now I'm not going to give it much importance. I suspect it's a bug in the BIOS, but I read that it can be a limitation of the memory controller. Anyway, in a few weeks I'll change the memories, so I'm not going to spend more time on this.\nI've also tested the energy consumption at rest, under load with one thread and with full load. The measurement was made with a power meter measuring from the AC outlet of the power supply. This is the result:\n- At rest: 42W.\n- HL benchmark, one-thread test\n· Test #1: 87W\n· Test #2: 83W\n· Test #3: 88W\n· Test #4: 92-115W\n- Multithread test:\n· Test #1: 152W\n· Test #2: 148W\n· Test #3: 152W\n· Test #4: 158W\n- BeamNG.drive (normal quality): 77-85W\n- Counter-Strike 2 (default settings): 83-91W.\nThe consumption is similar to the i5-3570K that is currently on the market while the performance is about 13 times superior in general terms when they are at full load.\nI'm going to install Debian Stable now, which is the system it's going to stay with.
