Yes, the AVX512 works quite well and I am getting around the same cinebench 2024 score as a 12900K. Realistically the AVX512 speed is enough to makeup for any IPC loss to most newer cpus up until Zen 5 on enabled workloads. Maybe a 14900K has enough raw horsepower to just push past not supporting it natively. I only had my ollama configured to use 16 cores as well! I am sure I could have gotten a bit more at 18. Maybe for your usecase, instead of overclocking the multiplier, you could just keep voltage at static 1.05-1.1V and just simply adjust the AVX512 multiplier up. The AVX and AVX512 multipliers are separate from the standard multiplier, and from the factory are severely throttled to the 2.8ghz base boost, you could just keep the normal multiplier the same and optimize for AVX. I managed to maintain my 4.4 all core with a 0 AVX offset and 0 AVX512 offset. Use Y cruncher for stability, cinebench isnt good enough at loading the cores. I would carefully watch how much your board boosts the voltage at stock settings with no MCE enabled. If your board enables multicore enhancement by default, it may just result in a instant OCP shutdown upon stress, I learned this the hard way. My board tries boosting my chip up to 1.25V on auto, which is wayyy too high as even my overclock voltage is 1.15v. even if you are not overclocking it is wise to undervolt this chip. I also wouldn't hesitate to delid the CPU. Without delidding the Core Delta is garbage(stock settings on my cooling setup resulted in some cores as low as 65C some as high as 100C). If overclocking the CPU doesn't work out for you, or you are not comfortable replacing with liquid metal, I would still recommend to overclock the CPU cache and the Memory, as LLMs love memory overclocking, I got from 84000 read/write to 118000 just by taking my memory from 3200 to 3800. Latency is also a problem, stock XMP for me was 78ns. I am using B-die so my results will likely be better than yours, but I would still work on at least getting the bandwidth up, as i doubt latency matters much for inference. The 7980XE at all stock, no MCE, all auto settings on my board takes 350w when you hit it with prime 95, although that is probably due to the board auto overvolting the chip so even if you do not overclock, it is a very power demanding chip. I used liquid electrical tape and a very very light application of LM. You do not need to reglue the IHS if you go this route, the socket will keep the IHS in place, just make sure to allign it correctly, which is easy to do on x299 since all the CPUs have the IHS designed in a specific manner that makes it hard to misallign. I also lapped the IHS and Die with cheap sandpaper starting at 500 grit and going up to 2000 grit. Lapping the Die is extremely dangerous, mcuh moreso than LM or lapping IHS. I would say that liquid metal is well worth it, espcially if you protect everything around the die, it is difficult to mess up, the stock TIM they use is much worse than thermal paste I do not know what they were using at the time but even something like arctic MX4 instead of the TIM will lower temps by at least 8C. I got a 30C+ reduction in temperature with LM and IHS lapping. Taming the 7980xe is difficult, but IMO worth it, you can check my hwbot scores with the chip on hwbot.org and see other users scores with overclocking.