Core i9 12900K processor review
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Ivrogne
This is how a new product should be: on the top of the table!
I'm glad Intel can pull this off, now we just need to wait for AMD's answer to this.
Damn I love competition!
bobnewels
Thanks for the review,cancelled my pre-orders 12900K,motherboard and ram. Lots of stock near me,I do not play games at 1080p but thinking maybe I should.
JamesSneed
Making very large cores really pushed single threaded performance. Those large performance cores are going to be a thing we will all have to get used to. Its obvious we need single threaded gains and to do that is to make cores with many more transistors but those cores take up lots of die space and consume more heat. I was doubtful but I suspect this approach will take off seeing the results today.
mackintosh
Well, colour me slightly disappointed. I expected more. A lot more.
chispy
Excellent review article @Hilbert Hagedoorn , nicely written and every bit of information is in there , thank you for the hard work.
Looking very good alder lake , amazing gains compared to rocket lake and vermeer. Only thing i dislike is the very high power consumption, needs at least 360 aio to shine.
Horus-Anhur
@Hilbert Hagedoorn Thanks for this great review.
But there is one important thing missing: 1% low frame rate.
I was also reading on another site, and they found that some games have significantly higher 1% low frame rates on Alder lake. Especially with DDR5.
This means that games will be a bit smoother to play on Alder Lake than on Zen3 or Rocket lake.
I'm guessing that the huge bandwidth of DDR5 helps with data streaming in some games.
Andy Watson
Thanks for the article, really enjoyed it. Will you be doing DDR4 v DDR5 at some point?
I'll be interested to see how the 8+0 12700k does for it's lower price, can the efficient cores be thrown away without much loss and how much power is saved over the 12900k? It's certainly cheaper of course.
MonstroMart
What did you expect? This is very good and much better than 11th gen. You have to wonder what's the point of the i9 with the i5 so close and the 5900x/5950x still being highly competitive for workstation duty but overall 12th gen is a huge success for intel. They are putting pressure on AMD to make the next 6600x and 6800x cpus better for sure.
MonstroMart
Considering the small difference between the i5 and the i9 i don't expect much for the i7 i mean there's almost no room for it to shine.
Valken
@ Hilbert - Please do a DDR4 with TIGHT latencies at the same DDR5 speed so we can compare! 4800 or 5300 or whatever you can get your hands on.
You can just bench at 1080p to show the CPU scaling!
Ryu5uzaku
Tbh I am glad Intel is in the lead again. AMD needs to do a better batch next again. So competition is win/win. Albeit Intel didn't destroy AMD in the slightest they did good.
H83
After reading the review, i´m having mixed feelings about this new CPU.
Performance is good, very good, specially single threaded but overall is not earth shattering compared to AMD, maybe with the exception of gaming, Intel´s pride and honour.
PCIE5 and DDR5 are some nice extras but not a must buy, at least for now.
The power aspect is a big disappointment, the little cores do very little to show their "worth" and the CPU is a power hog, it´s basically factory overclocked, something Intel has been doing over the last years to provide more performance.
In the end it´s a great CPU, but it´s not the second Conroe like some guys whished and it´s not going to destroy AMD.
Talking about AMD, all they need is price to compete against Intel´s latest but the question is do they need to???
Great review as always!
chispy
Dang ! All the 2d and 3d world records have fallen at hwbot , every single one of the benchmarks alder lake beats everything else , fast little devil. Now is AMDs turn to crank up the knobs with 3d Vermeer refresh . Loving the competition !
https://hwbot.org/
mackintosh
@chispy Oh no! Anyway.
@H83 AMD do need to compete on price now. They got a free pass and fleeced us last year, but fortunately they can't get away with it anymore. Unfortunately, they don't have to do much this time around just yet. Drop the 5000 series at most $30 below ADL and then slightly improve performance with Zen3D and come in at the same price point as ADL did. That's all there's to it - for now. Unless they really don't want to eat into their margins, in which case they will do nothing and wait it out, though I don't know how they expect to sell any of their remaining stock given what Intel have shown us here today.
-Tj-
What a fail of cpu. Techpowerup said it cant oc at all unless you put in some crazy volts in it.. nvm 100c+
Even 12700k looks on the limit.
Also gaming, meh.. 11700k it is then.
PrMinisterGR
I am probably biased, but isn't this a bit "meh"?
All these tricks, new memory, new PCIe revision and power consumption to end up at a maybe +5% in single threaded in the real world (with the exception of Hitman), and basically lose in multi-threaded to a year-old CPU. Intel needed this, but I think that even the Zen3+Cache will be equal to this, and destroy it in any power consumption metric. The price seems nice though, unless AMD drops the 5950x to 500$, which they probably can super easily.
The power consumption is indeed ridiculous (and that's from someone with a 3090).
The really interesting parts of this for me is really the GPU, and the platform itself, which looks awesome.
kill007
I know this is 12900k review, but that 12600k for gaming....jesus...for that price and crushing everything and staying within a whisker of 12900k....
i would imagine the 12700k also having similar impact.
its like the 3080 vs 3090 situation for gamers...
kakiharaFRS
1080p gaming seems always better than AMD...so it got it's king of gaming crown back, cool
tempting for me and my unreplaceable lucky no ghosting 1080p monitor
thanks for the watts per core comparison, people who only owned 1-8 cores don't really understand that they multiply the watts and only see the "big number" something I only understood when I built a 24c threadripper PC if you overclock it and each uses like 3watts well that's +72watts overall and it goes very quickly...I managed to have my 3960x use 430watts like that O_O because I never tought about it and raised voltage too much (unusable even with liquid cooling cpu went to 100°)
20 watts isn't bad for the new intels
p.s. just for comparison my 5950x with CTR 2.1 RC5 4750 all cores @ 1.35v
CR23 29451/1609
CR20 11373/638
multi-threading is not up to amd but single thread aka EVERY DX11 or older game is noticeably better on intel
@chispy only logical that they fall Intel can be overclocked and tweaked also most reviewers seem to forget when talking about amd that high end gpus are hungry for faster cpu and memory speed, when the 3090 was on the 9900k I did have higher fps in several games than on my current 5950x
schmidtbag
I have a feeling DDR5 is where most of the performance enhancements have come from.
I agree; but considering how expensive the E cores are, I guess it makes sense that they're still relatively power hungry.
Especially given AMD hasn't yet moved to DDR5 or released their V-cache.
H83
I´ve just seen the prices of Asus boards in Portugal and now a decent board cost more than 300€ and the ROG Strix versions are more than 450€, holy s***!!!
