Never required but I would always recommend, especially for new builds.

Terrified of power consumption?

Sounds like you need to talk to a shrink more than R/intel

I use win 10 with 13600k.

No issues.

Can’t speak to performance vs win 11.

You would probably be very happy with either.

Go with whatever you get the best deal on.

For most users, you won’t be able to tell the difference.

5700xt should have been on the list, aged so well….

All depends in use case, if you are doing lots of cpu intensive work, get an serious aio.

If you are mainly doing just gaming and lighter workloads, a nice air cooler or smaller AiO should be fine.