Core i9 12900K processor review - Performance - CineBench 20

Challenges of testing a processor when there are no reference motherboards

Each year, it is getting increasingly complicated to test processor performance accurately; the motherboard manufacturers control many settings. On the other hand, Intel does not release reference review motherboards anymore; thus, motherboards manufacturers will do tons of tweaks 'at default' in the BIOS to stay ahead of the competition and spread their lineup relative for performance from mainstream towards premium. Settings can include All cores frequency locks, clock tweaks, and enhancements in power states and duration (PL2/Tau). For a motherboard review, this is all fine; however, we want to test as close as possible to reference performance for a processor review. To bypass these challenges, in the BIOS, we disable such features to remain as close as possible to reference performance. We expect you will see lots of reviews with higher or lower performance numbers as many media will load up BIOS defaults and start testing without checking. We thus test at reference performance (as close as possible) with settings as referenced by Intel. For motherboard reviews, we, of course, revert to motherboard defaults as it is well within their right to segment and optimize their lineup performance-wise.

Windows 10 or 11?

Please read - During the initiation of Alder Lake reviews, we have been faced with the fact that Alder Lake needs Windows 11 for its thread scheduler in order to work and function properly with the P and E cores.  At that stage, we wanted to retest all processors and switch to Windows 11 for AMD Ryzen 5000 processors also. As you have learned, Microsoft did not support Ryzen properly when released. A week or so ago a series of patches were introduced to solve the bigger part of performance losses. Up-to-date, AMD performance on Windows 11 still is not on par with what it needs to be. Roughly 2~3% performance is still missing somewhere. With that fact in mind, we made the call to leave AMD performance results based on Windows 10 and solely use Windows 11 for Alder lake. This is a devil's dilemma, but using Ryzen 5000 results on an immature Windows 11 platform did not feel right or fair to AMD. Once the last bit of performance discrepancy has been fixed, we’ll update the results -- but at that stage, the AMD Ryzen 5000 performance in-between Windows 10 and 11 are not yet close to NIL, albeit with each week passing the differential is becoming more marginal.

Processor performance: CineBench 20

Maxon released their Cinebench R20 benchmark, more capable for dealing with the heavily threaded processors. You need a PC with at least 4 GB of memory and SSE3 instruction set support. Maxon states Cinebench R20 is now using four times the memory and eight times the CPU computational power compared to Cinebench R15.