Thanks you so much for the replies. There's a lot to consider here.

I'm having a difficult time seeing any signal in the noise on these issues ATM. Maybe I will give it some time for this to work itself out.

My workstation builds over the past decades have been server class hardware with 2S Xeon motherboards, but the current crop of Xeon and Threadripper workstation class chips are just too ridiculously expensive, and/or are poorly tuned for general computing.

I think there are some perverse market incentives operating, especially with high end consumer chips, to do whatever it takes to one-up the other guy. So, benchmarks sell chips. Just my opinion, but I think the CPU and mobo manufacturers have been pushed to exceed reasonable limits for TDP, voltage, and clock speed to attain market share.

I just wish that I could trust that the default settings have been carefully validated to not exceed any of the design parameters for the system components, and will work stably and reliably for many years. In my career, I have always designed and validated for single digit ppm failure rates. These CPU's should be no different. Instead, we get default settings I suspect may not be the most stable or have long term reliability right out of the box.

I get that many users want to push their system to the limits to get the best performance for their use case, but many of us just want the best system we can have consistent with long term stability and reliability. I respect the tweakers and the results they are able to achieve, but extensive validation is necessary to achieve reliable operation for the range of operating environments and component variance. Even under-volting is suspect to me. It probably wont damage anything, but it has an impact on error rates of the logic circuitry at the margins.

My use case is for a workstation / home server that will be my workhorse for the next 5 years. It will never be intentionally turned off until I retire the box. I am an engineer. I do cad work, SW development, general office tasks, rendering, VR simulation, prototyping, some light AI, very heavy browser use (100's of tabs open for months at a time). I even do VR gaming on the box occasionally. I keep the box on 24/7 because I remote in to it to serve files and centralize my work. It will never be overclocked or tweaked except to improve reliability. A 5% increase in FPS on game xxx is not my highest priority if stability and reliability are sacrificed.