As others have stated, there is no advantage to having PCIe 4.0 except in a few professional workloads. I would highly recommend getting an Intel 10xxx series CPU instead of a 11xxx series CPU if you must go Intel. The 11xxx series has lower gaming performance, power consumption is too high, and performance across motherboards can vary wildly (up to 45%). You are also going to need to budget for a good cooler and motherboard as significant costs as well as they are needed to get the most out of any 10xxx series or 11xxx series CPU. If there isn't enough in the budget for that I'd recommend dropping down to something like a 10400F / 10600K.
11th gen isn't worse in games, power consumption is adjustable and similar to Comet Lake, performance only varies due to different PL/Tau values set by default.
Whether cheap works or not really depends. In the case of the Intel 11xxx series even midrange is not nearly good enough, with up to a 45% performance hit on some midranged motherboards:
Or is just manufacturers that can't design a proper VRMs?
Forget about using a cheap motherboard with those power hungry CPUs.
I'm not suggesting that, just saying that cheap boards are usually just fine.
I'd say it's about 50/50. Reviews of cheaper products clearly indicated a higher failure rate and people generally have more issues with them. QC is lower, materials are cheaper, and VRMs are sparse. Multiple reviews and investigations have shown us time and time again that cheap boards perform worse and use lower end caps, which are rated for a lower lifespan and rated for lower temperatures. You are always making compromises when buying low end motherboards. They don't go as cheap as to have the products fail in warranty (for obvious reasons) but don't go expect longenvity when the components on the board are rated for 1/4rth the lifespan of a quality motherboard.
By cheap I meant not what Steve from HU tests. I meant truly cheap boards like Asrock HDV series, Gigabyte S2P series (DS3H is actually upper low end series), Asus Prime products like K or E models. Their QC is the same. Materials are exactly the same, but parts aren't. VRMs are sparse, but they should be good enough. Your lifespan figures don't make sense.
"Cheap power supplies, that YouTubers call out as being bombs are the most common units in prebuilts and they last and don't really spark or explode."
Most pre-builts don't last and many of those "bomb" PSUs have been objectively tested to in fact have serious issues. Gigabyte's infamous PSU is in fact a bomb, it's exploded on multiple reviewers now.
Gigabyte is a premium brand. And despite that it was just badly engineered. Nothing to do with it being cheap. By cheap power supplies I meant something like this:
Inter-Tech Elektronik Handels GmbH - Gehäuse, Netzteile und vieles mehr aus der Hardwarewelt
www.inter-tech.de
It costs 18,40 Euros (22.51 US dollars, US has their own cheap PSU brand Diablotek, which is pretty much an equivalent of cheap European brands). That's half of cheapest 80 plus rated PSUs from better known manufacturers.
"I personally saw family PC lasting 13 years with cheap "bomb" looking Codegen 300X power supply and bottom of the barrel DFI board. It worked perfectly fine, until one day capacitors gave out and RAM started to malfunction. That's pretty good, especially knowing that board was made during capacitor plaque era. During 'rona, my dad brought home work computer, which has i7 2700K and it has some cheap Inter-Tech 500W PSU and it is with some random not high end Intel board. It still works perfectly fine and was never repaired. It's now at least decade old already. Eh, people seriously underestimate cheap components."
Keep playing with fire and some day you are doing to get burned. I've personally had a PSU catch fire (Rosewill branded). People aren't underestimating cheap parts, they are providing recommendations so that your entire PC isn't destroyed by your power supply or so that your house doesn't catch fire because you could be bothered to spend $10 more to buy something that's electrically safe.
Gee, it wasn't me who put that thing in there. Pretty much all local prebuilt computer sellers use those things and sell them to people and unsurprisingly they are very popular. However, I'm still aren't entirely convinced that those cheap units are really as bad as media says. Often some Youtuber buy one for lolz, ignores written wattage on 12v rail and then claims that it was poop
Here's a video of such poor reviewer:
He insists that PSU is 600 watts, but he never checked rail specs. Turns out that he was wrong, was biased and came to wrong conclusion. The PSU itself only delivers 540 watts on 12 volt rails and rails are split into 12V1 and 12V2, meaning that each rail has lower wattage limit than combined wattage for 12V rails. 12V1 rail is probably CPU connector and 12V2 is likely for the rest of components. Greg plugged in two cards in SLI, which likely overloaded 12V2 rail as it was rated for 28 amps and 12 volts +- 0.5 volt. So to be on safe side, lets use 11.5 volts and we get that rail was rated for 322 watts. Two 80 series cards in SLI as I remember likely consumed more than 400 watts. Is it really any wonder that PSU was loud and likely won't last all that long in that usage case? People and Youtubers really don't check wattage ratings of each rail and often come incorrect conclusions and spread fud. Most PSU companies don't lie about wattage as it regulated to some extent and they would have a shit ton of lawsuits to deal with. Some companies indeed do lie about PSU specs, but it's so rare that it's hardly worth to think about.
And if you don't like Greg, then there's this twat who clearly overloaded rails and his PSU failed on camera:
It was only made to deliver 14 and 16 amps on 12 volt rails. A combined 12 volt rail rating was 350 watts. I don't even have to say that Timmy overloaded the crap out of it and then said that it was POS. It's a low end unit for sure, but for what it is rated for it delivered. Again typical PSU fud.
And power supply nowadays can't really destroy your PC. It usually has 4 protections to prevent harming components and to stop PSU catching on fire. Shit like that only happened when PSUs didn't have any protections and that was really common until early 2000s. Beyond that it's a super rare occurrence.
As for performance, you can follow Intel guidelines, run your CPU at full speed, but then you need a beefy cooler and quality motherboard and PSU to deliver the power it needs. Or you can follow the same guidelines from the other side, buy a motherboard that enforces Intel recommended PL and Tau values by default, and sacrifice some performance. The choice is yours. As for me, I'd rather buy the quality components and enforce PL and Tau values that meet my system's cooling capacity, but that's a different story.
I personally don't see any problems with just sticking to Intel's suggested PL1 and PL2 values. They are good enough and are nice if you want a system that is cool and quiet. I bought a board that can keep i5 running at unlocked PL values and I keep it this way, but I have used it with various PL values and stock PL values are decent. my board defaults to 80 watts PL1 and 125 watt PL2 and that's enough to keep 10400F at full speed at nearly any load. With turbo boost off, i5 is phenomenally cool and power efficient, but you can feel the loss of performance. The only thing that I don't really recommend is using Intel stock cooler. It's just not good enough. Motherboard should be able to handle chip at full blast too, but not necessarily it should be with higher PL values set in BIOS. It's not for everyone.
If it's any similar to my old HTPC motherboard, then you have PL1, PL2 and "PL1 duration" (Tau) settings in the motherboard BIOS under the CPU settings. PL1 is the overall power limit, Tau is the time in seconds for which PL1 can be exceeded, and PL2 is the exceeded power limit in that timespan. It's a cheap H61 board, but still lets me change these values to whatever I want to, so I imagine with better built and more modern boards, it must work at least similarly.
Thanks.
