The Best of Intel’s Alder Lake, and the Hottest

As far as the top CPU SKUs are concerned, Intel’s Core i9-12900KS processor is very sharp, in contrast to AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor with 96MB of 3DV cache. While AMD’s over-the-top chip was positioned as the fastest game processor in the world, Intel is the fastest chip and has focused on winning the competition across all workloads.

As the last 12th generation Core (Alder Lake) desktop product from Intel, the Core i9-12900KS is specifically designed to be powerful. This is a “special edition” processor. In short, it’s a small, high-priced chip for customers who need or want the fastest possible product, with lower prices and lower power consumption.

This is a strategy that Intel has now adopted several times, especially in the Coffee Lake generation i9-9900KS, which is relatively successful for Intel. And yes, while the market for such top-end chips is fairly small, having the fastest chips on the market has a huge impact on the overall mind share. That’s why Intel aims to keep some distance from AMD’s successful Ryzen 5000 family of chips, summarizing the last (and fastest) words of Alder Lake CPU performance and peaking (turbo). ) Chips have been shipped. The clock speed of the very important performance core has increased to 5.5GHz.

Today’s review tests Alder Lake’s fastest against both Intel’s other chips and AMD’s flagship product. Does the 12900K boosted at this clock speed stand out from the crowd? And is the trade-off associated with achieving 5.5GHz worth it against what Intel positions as the fastest processor in the world? Let’s check.

Below is a detailed list of coverage for Intel Alder Lake and Z690.

In a nutshell, the Core i9-12900K review described Alder Lake’s dual-architecture hybrid design, including the differences between P (performance) and E (efficiency core). The P-Core is based on Intel’s high-performance Golden Cove architecture and provides solid single-threaded performance. Gracemont-based E-cores, on the other hand, perform poorly on their own, but because of their small size and much lower power consumption, Intel benefits multithreaded workloads without wasting chip power and heat budgets. Can bring.

Intel Core i9-12900KS: World’s Fastest Processor

Not only is Intel happy with its large selection of premium 12th generation Core series processors, including its flagship Core i9-12900K at the time, but it also marketed the Core i9-12900KS a few months ago. I put it in. The Core i9-12900KS, which is primarily aimed at gamers and enthusiasts who need the best performance, is basically a high-bin version of the Core i9-12900K, but with some (less subtle) differences.

Based on the same Alder Lake die, both 12900Ks share the same number of cores and threads (8P + 8E). Instead, the most important difference is in speed. The Core i9-12900KS Performance (P) core has a 5.5GHz boost core, which is 300MHz higher than a regular K chip. Meanwhile, the fundamental frequency is also 200 MHz higher, making it a chip that offers a fundamental clock speed of 3.4 GHz and a boost clock speed of 5.5 GHz. This makes the Core i9-12900KS the fastest desktop processor hat Intel has ever created in terms of ready-to-use core frequencies. Even the efficiency (E) core has a high clock on this SKU, with 100 MHz bumps at both the base and boost frequencies, and the E core has a 2.5 GHz base and 4.0 GHz boost.

The engineering trade-off for rising core frequencies in both performance (P) and efficiency (E) cores is that the Core i9-12900KS consumes more power. The base TDP is 150W and the boost TDP is up to 241W. This is a 25W increase in base TDP compared to the original Core i9-12900K processor. This is a hot running processor that, from our experience, can consume a significant amount of power when overclocked. And there is room for even higher. Like other K-series chips, the 12900KS is multiplier unlocked, allowing users to further overclock these chips.

Focusing on the price, the official price of the Intel Core i9-12900KS is $ 739 for a 1000 chip order. Street pricing is now almost spot-on, Amazon When Newegg We will charge $ 735 each. Officially, this sets a premium of $ 150 on the top 12900KS, but when compared to retail prices, it’s now approaching a premium of about $ 175. It’s also $ 235 higher than AMD’s most expensive desktop chip, the Ryzen 9 5950X processor ($ 499), and $ 300 cheaper than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D ($ 439). When it comes to these “hello” products, the concept of value and dreams usually go out of the window, and users looking for the fastest and best are expected to dig deeper into their products. increase. wallet.

Core i9-12900KS reaches 5.5GHz with P cores 4 and 5 and the remaining P cores at 5.2GHz

There is a big price difference between the two, but no doubt. The Core i9-12900KS was created to directly compete with AMD’s impressive Ryzen 7 5800X3D and its 96MB 3DL 3V-Cache. Proposed as the ultimate game processor, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, as we’ve seen, is extremely powerful in games and often leads in CPU-limited workloads. Even considering the 5.5 GHz performance core boost frequency, the large pool of 5800X3D L3 caches shines in games where that additional cache is available.Titles where additional cache does not affect performance, 5.5 GHz insane clock speed shines. That’s Intel’s hope here.

The most important advantage of Intel’s Alder Lake special edition chip is that it’s not a one-trick pony. This SKU is based on an overall clock speed improvement, which provides considerable horsepower for computational tasks. This is where AMD Ryzen 7 5800 X3D lags behind its competitors. This is because the L3 cache usually does not affect rendering, encoding, and transcoding performance like a pure core grant. It’s interesting to see how the Core i9-12900KS overlaps with the compute suite i9-12900K, but it’s figuratively facing the game suite Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

Testbed and setup

Intel ThreadDirector initially had some issues when using Windows 10 when launching Alder Lake, but using the latest Windows 11 operating system completely eliminates the core scheduling issue. Intel Thread Director works with Alder Lake to assign the appropriate P and E cores to different tasks based on workload complexity and severity. We will also test the Core i9-12900KS with DDR5 memory with JEDEC specifications (DDR5-4800 CL40). I’m also using Windows 11. It is being used for CPU and motherboard reviews as we progress from 2022 onwards.

The test uses:

All other chips for comparison were run as tests listed in Bench, the Windows 10 benchmark database.