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A Noctua NH-D14 is considered "thermally constrained" for these 13th gen chips? Good lord.

I'm looking forward to your test results though as I'm considering building a new desktop around 13th gen.

Not sure about the performance of NH-D14 and 13700K, but my NH-D15 (upgraded from NH-U12A) is running OK for 13700k with Intel's PL1/PL2 settings, hovering around 60~70c during full load at 25c ambient temperature. Unlimited PL2 is a different story and can go up to 100c during full load. My previous NH-U12A build ran at about 2-4c higher temperature under load.

I've been experimenting with different settings and found that unlimited PL2 and undervolting the CPU by -150mV give the best temperature to performance at ~80c during full load. It has been running stable for few days, and I'm pretty happy with the result so far.

For stability testing I like y-cruncher. It teases out edge cases that many XMP profiles are unstable with. I'd take a slightly less efficient system that I am confident will not error.

Also, those numbers aren't far off the out-of-box behavior I had, but I like to tinker. I throttle with PL set to 190 but not at 180.

I'd avoid Intel entirely if heat/power efficiency matter to you at all. AMD has had acceptable performance with far better heat/power use across the board for a few years now.

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