This was widely covered by the tech press back in April and was common knowledge among gaming enthusiasts much earlier. Intel has been working with motherboard

This was widely covered by the tech press back in April and was common knowledge among gaming enthusiasts much earlier. Intel has been working with motherboard suppliers to leave aggressive overclocking features turned on, and it's also pretty clear they're not correctly binning their chips. For a while now Intel hasn't been "innovating", just turning up the wick. They're clearly lagging in R&D while also trying to chase the very tippy-top of gaming benchmarks which makes no sense, even for world-class competitive FPS players. Nvidia's been flat out telling people complaining about games crashing on 13th and 14th gen CPUs to 'talk to Intel': https://www.techspot.com/news/102611-nvidia-advises-crash-prone-cpu-owners-look-intel.html https://www.techspot.com/news/102611-nvidia-advises-crash-pr... If you overlooked Ryzen because of issues like memory latency in the early days, I encourage looking at them again. If you do your homework, you can find motherboards that support ECC ram to varying degrees (ie from "it'll run but with ECC disabled" to "error correcting but doesn't report it" to "full support, just not listed as such".) I believe AM4-socket ECC support is much more prevalent, if that's important to you. Familiarize yourself with AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive, which can be used for overclocking and/or undervolting. Unlike AMD's graphics cards (which are space heaters, though the current 7xxx series is an improvement), Ryzen processors are fairly efficient in stock form; more so if you do even a bit of mild undervolting. Don't waste your time with the stock coolers supplied with any of the chips. They'll keep the chip cool enough, but are noisy as hell compared to a well-performing $30 dual-fan air cooler (GamersNexus has found several in their reviews.) Keep your BIOS up to date for AGESA (AMD microcode) improvements, and keep your AMD chipset drivers up to date as well.