Ok, that looks promising.
Yes, the idea is to keep the performance similar to identical.
"Enhanced Turbo" is a mainboard function which actually equates to overclocking. It's mostly a way for the boards of one brand to perform better than the boards of competing brands in reviews. Because if all other components are comparable, the boards would all have roughly the same benchmarks results, as the board itself has very little say on the overall performance. It's mostly down to the CPU, RAM and GPU. But obviously there can be a huge impact on performance once the BIOS settings are changed from the accepted norm or Intel standard. You see this to a degree with the MTP, which is not accurately applied by MSI to 190W, instead they choose 241W, as if your CPU was a 12900K. I can only call this a deliberate choice, because it also happens in the second BIOS release.
Now, "Enhanced Turbo" would be going way above a simple power limit increase. What this does is, it allows the highest turbo multiplicator for single-core load to be active no matter how many cores are fully loaded. Usually, the more cores are loaded, the less high the CPU is allowed to clock, in order to keep power consumption and heat production in check. But not so with this function. So when you have a rather high-end CPU like yours, this can wreak havoc. I hope it's not enabled when it's on Auto, but it's better to set it to disabled manually. Other brands also have this "dirty trick" up their sleeve, on ASUS it's called "MultiCore Enhancement", you can read more about it here:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/6214/multicore-enhancement-the-debate-about-free-mhz
Yes, thermal throttling has to be avoided like the plague. This is what will kill your CPU performance. Linpack Xtreme, and even Cinebench R23, are not the kind of loads you will normally have in daily use, unless you are 3D rendering or something. They are the extreme end of the kind of load you will see. So if you can keep it at around 90°C or below on these most extreme loads, it's somewhat acceptable. Of course, the CPU cooling can't be called good, but usually you won't see this kind of load/temps (for example in gaming), so it's not a total dealbreaker.
As for the longevity, don't worry, this CPU will keep working until it's outdated. Other things will give up earlier. First tends to be the PSU, i give yours 4-8 years (if you use the PC regularly) before it will develop or cause a problem. It's not a particularly good unit, it's a noname "Apevia" so they may have used cheap components. See
here and
here for some further reading material on PSUs.
Of interest for longevity are also some other temperatures, for which you need to run HWinfo64 Sensors with all sensors expanded (click on the little <--> arrows on the bottom). First let it run a while in idle, so the "minimum" baselines for the values are established. Then produce full CPU load with Cinebench R23. After the CPU temperatures have stabilized at the highest level, take a screenshot. This will show everything at once.
The score should stay pretty similar to Mode 9. A couple dozen points less is not such a big deal, it would only amount to 1% difference tops. You just don't want to see 4000 points less or so.
About the temps, you have to keep in mind, this is prolonged full load at a level which you don't normally have, unless you encode/render etc. for long periods of time. As i said, in games for example, the power consumption of the CPU will be much less than this. And it better be, because then the graphics card is also heating up the air inside the case more. So yeah, if you can live with the front panel being off, that would be good for the cooling no matter what.
Having a relatively closed front has gone out of fashion a bit with more experienced builders. Mesh fronts have become more popular. There has been a realization that in order to lower the noise level, you might as well use a case with great airflow and thus be able to reduce the fan speeds, instead of using a "noise-insulating" case that on the other hand necessitates higher fan speeds.
I wrote about the case differences here recently,
https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?threads/loud-pc-post-build.370357/
No, the 12700K has two more performance cores and clocks higher with higher VCore, it will draw 50-60W more than your 12600K. If we go by the MTP numbers, your is 150W and the 12700K is 190W, but we already know the boards don't adhere to that, so looking at some reviews, you're looking at 25-30% more power consumption (and thus heat) for the 12700K.
The explanation of his temperature problems are also quite simple. The 120mm AIO is not adequate for this CPU, it would be more suited for the 12600K and below. The suboptimal case design compounds the issue. This is not a problem of his particular individual PC, it's a design/conception flaw of this system by CyberPowerPC, as they have done in the past as well (see the Youtube video).
There are exactly two choices: 1) Optimize the system yourself as best you can, which (short of a CPU cooler swap or more) we have done by now, and accept what you get by that, or 2) don't accept it and RMA the whole thing, with some strong comments for them to think about on how it needs better cooling.
Because:
It is clear to me that they would just enter the BIOS and restrict the CPU by setting lower power limits until their cooling becomes adequate, at the cost of performance. They are not interested in supplying people with a better CPU cooler on their dime, because first of all that would mean that they admit to the cooling being inadequate, as well as set a precedent that would enable other buyers of such system to demand the same.
