What's nice is the higher end i9 processor is included in the price, whereas with the other PC only comes with an i7 stock.
The 13700k and 13900k are similar in performance for gaming, with only the biggest difference being the amount of E cores the i9 has. If you look at my specs you'll see I have the i7 12700k rather than an i9 for that reason. They both have the same amount of performance cores.
How good would this liquid cooling be?
Thermaltake Custom Flexible Tubing Water Cooling kit with 360mm Radiator, W4 CPU Block, D5 Reservoir+Pump (3 x Standard 120MM Fans)
Temp spikes will be the same since it's a cheap block. The copper radiator will help with a larger delta to heat soak but honestly you'll never max the i9 out anyways in terms of getting that far. It's just going to be way more maintenance compared to the AIO that comes with the PC, as you'll need to drain, flush, and bleed the custom water system every 6 months. Thermaltake's kits also use cheap clear tubing that will yellow rather quickly as well. It's going to be a lot more maintenance for the same temps. There's a reason it's practically the same cost as that Corsair AIO on the bottom of that selection list.
Power Supply: 1000Watts - Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 1000W 80+ GOLD w/ PCIE 12+4Pins Connector for PCIe 5.0 graphics cards
If you're going with 1000W get the Corsair 1000W RMe instead.
Never knew it was so easy to custom build a PC. Last PC I built I had to go select the individual parts and hope they all worked well together. Now a website has every option available and determines if an option I select works with the rest of the options and tells me what to change an option to if it won't work.
This is still a pre-built PC, just using off the shelf components. They limit you in what you can actually buy in terms of better components elsewhere like motherboard, power supply, RAM, etc. Here's an example of better GPU (4080), better PSU, better brand RAM, same case, realistic CPU for same performance, better and higher capacity SSD, and better name brand AIO cooler. All for the same cost minus the convenience. Both machines at the end of the day will be great, you're just paying more for it to be built.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/DrxJd9
Far as overclocking goes I doubt I'll ever need to do that, but if I do I'll use Throttle Stop.
If I feel the need to overclock the graphics card I'll use MSI Afterburner which is one reason I selected an MSI video card.
Throttlestop isn't for this kind of hardware. CPU OC's on these machines will need to be done via the bios, and realistically all you need to do is just use 'multicore enhancements' option in the Asus bios which removes CPU power limits.
MSI Afterburner isn't brand specific, it can be used on any brand of hardware. The 4000 series will be the last supported because MSI stopped paying the guy developing this software for a year since the war started. (The dev is Russian)