had a U12A on my 12900K for a while actually. thermals were fine but the fan noise can be a bit much at higher RPMs. that will come up in gaming unless you set a custom fan curve or power limit the proc. tried fan curve first and it gutted my R23 but ymmv. simple power limit of 250W was good for 90-95% of liquid-cooled performance in my limited testing.

13600KF for $250 on Amazon right now seems like a nice deal unless you need 14th gen

could get away with a 12600KF with a 4070 but I think it’s worth paying more for the raptor lake cores. alder lake is gonna struggle a bit with 1% lows by comparison