So I built my new PC over TG weekend, and got it setup and running the following weekend. Having my existing PC up and running made the whole thing far more leisurely. A few interesting things. For one, building it took quite a bit longer than I'd expected. Mostly due to learning curves along the way, and the occasional setback. Figuring out RGB headers, and mounting brackets for the AIO water cooler took a while. Moreover, it initially wouldn't boot due to a RAM error. After quite a bit of fiddling with it the suggestion that worked was to simply remove and re-seat the CPU. Problem solved, and no problems ever since.
The tales of 11th gen Intels running hot are not exaggerated. Doing actual work it runs in the low to mid 80s in my relatively cool condo. If I really cook the thing with Prime95 it'll hit 100 pretty fast with the AVX512 instruction set running. According to Intel that test represents an unrealistic 130% CPU load and shouldn't be considered. A more realistic P95 test hits the same low to mid 80s. In the Summer that's likely to hit closer to 90. At the same time, the comparable 5800x seems to run just as hot. It uses a bit less power, but it concentrates it more into a smaller location. Eventually I may replace the fans in the LFII just for my own peace of mind, but it's really not a problem.
Interestingly, I rarely notice where it seems to be a whole lot faster. I can unzip an 8gb file in about 8 seconds, which is pretty cool, but how often do you need to do that? Apps open faster, but that owes more to moving away from SATA. Data stored right in the PIC lane makes all the difference. Mostly it seems a testament to how good my old PC was. I still marvel at that thing. I also found that my old PC hadn't bottlenecked my graphics card much at all. GPU benchmarks stayed mostly the same. And insofar as the power intensive things I may regularly do, they're typically GPU based. Trying to upscale video at the CPU level takes days instead of hours, for example. One thing I didn't try is re-encoding video, my hunch is that'll be faster, but since that normally happens after the upscaling, it just hasn't come up.
This has been running with my existing GTX-1060. I just managed to buy a factory water-cooled 2080 Super for actually less than it retailed for, so that'll be happening this coming up weekend. I suspect that will make a pretty big difference. It was more than I wanted to spend, but in this market it's was a bargain. This card is generally good for 4k on ultra, if I ever decide to bother with that, and tensor cores plus hardware encoding should make short work of video editing. Over all I'm optimistic that this will still be well performing in 2031, which was my goal.