Intel Core i9-12900K Review: Alder Lake Arrives

These results are good, but Zen3 with 3D cache should be able to compete when it launches (at least the the high end).

The bigger problem for AMD is the 12600K. They really need to at least bring the 5800X in line with it and lower the price of the 5600x by about 50$.
 
Its a massive improvement over the 11th gen. But yes, I do think there is big progress to come. It seems Intel have been awoken.

At this point I’m more worried about AMD. The last time they got beat by Intel it took them over a decade to come back with a competitive product. I pray that does not happen again.
I think they'll be fine, thanks to Dr. Su and their brilliant crop of engineers now. Zen 3 with V-Cache might retake the performance crown at least in some games and apps or extend their lead, and Zen 4 will be a wider architecture on TSMC's 5nm process. Raptor Lake is rumored to not be a massive change from the Alder Lake cores (probably like Sandy to Ivy Bridge or Ivy to Haswell)
 
Spring for a 3090? They has several they just tend to be amd biased around here so they keep the 3090's in their personal rigs at home (that way they can continue to enjoy the benefits without giving up their "we are AMD fans like you all" approach to engagement.
Actually I would appreciate a 3090 benchmark as well since Nvidia has higher driver overhead (the scheduler is implemented in software whereas AMD has a hardware scheduler).
 
I think they'll be fine, thanks to Dr. Su and their brilliant crop of engineers now. Zen 3 with V-Cache might retake the performance crown at least in some games and apps or extend their lead, and Zen 4 will be a wider architecture on TSMC's 5nm process. Raptor Lake is rumored to not be a massive change from the Alder Lake cores (probably like Sandy to Ivy Bridge or Ivy to Haswell)
Lol. So you predict AMD will storm back and Intel will stagnate. I think you might be looking through red-tinted glasses mate.

I hope AMD can beat this and make this cheaper. I also hope that raptor lake comes back and makes those AMD parts cheaper etc etc.

We benefit the most when these companies are beating each other equally. Maybe that way we can get 5950X performance for i5 prices soon. (Or i9 performance for R5 money).
 
Actually I would appreciate a 3090 benchmark as well since Nvidia has higher driver overhead (the scheduler is implemented in software whereas AMD has a hardware scheduler).
Yup agreed and also ~85% of the market use those Nvidia drivers. It would also be nice if we had some CPU bound games to be tested. All the “draws” here look GPU bound,
 
Except that gas actually costs money... a couple hundred watts costs almost nothing for people in North America....

Power requirements are really only an issue for mobile parts... for 99% of the purchasers of these PCs, they plug it in and forget all about the power it uses.
Comments complaining about power consumption are just desperate fanboys clutching at straws. Intel have beaten AMD on both price and performance and it’s literally all they have left to argue. You don’t buy an unlocked K series flagship part if you give a dam about power consumption, or a Ryzen 5950x for that matter.

The difference in power costs will never equal the extra money you currently pay for a 5950x in most countries.
I think there are few points to make here. The Ryzen gen 3 is a year old now. So the expectation should be that Intel should win with a brand new processor. Also, electricity over time does have a cost. Sure 130 watts over an hour might only cost you around $0.02. But, let's say you have the processor for 4 years and you average running it at full power just 2 hours a day. That's around $60. Also these motherboards for Intel are more expensive. The difference in price is easily made up by the difference in motherboard prices provided you are trying to build within a budget. So to claim these processors are cheaper is a bit misleading considering to use them properly, you have to spend more. Also, cooling is a bigger problem, so you'll likely need to spend more there as well. Overall this processor will cost you more, and so the truck example stands.

Kudos to Intel for taking the crown back from AMD, for now, but I just don't think this is as impressive as its being made out to be. That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
 
I think there are few points to make here. The Ryzen gen 3 is a year old now. So the expectation should be that Intel should win with a brand new processor. Also, electricity over time does have a cost. Sure 130 watts over an hour might only cost you around $0.02. But, let's say you have the processor for 4 years and you average running it at full power just 2 hours a day. That's around $60. Also these motherboards for Intel are more expensive. The difference in price is easily made up by the difference in motherboard prices provided you are trying to build within a budget. So to claim these processors are cheaper is a bit misleading considering to use them properly, you have to spend more. Also, cooling is a bigger problem, so you'll likely need to spend more there as well. Overall this processor will cost you more, and so the truck example stands.

Kudos to Intel for taking the crown back from AMD, for now, but I just don't think this is as impressive as its being made out to be. That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
So you equate $60 over 4 years as being a considerable sum of money? That's not even 1 AAA video game at retail price...

And if you are looking to buy the best of the best - which is what Intel is claiming this CPU is... you SHOULD be spending more for it. That it retails for less than the 5950 is a nice bonus... had Intel not been getting its @ss handed to it for the past several years by AMD, rest assured this CPU would cost double.
 
I think there are few points to make here. The Ryzen gen 3 is a year old now. So the expectation should be that Intel should win with a brand new processor. Also, electricity over time does have a cost. Sure 130 watts over an hour might only cost you around $0.02. But, let's say you have the processor for 4 years and you average running it at full power just 2 hours a day. That's around $60. Also these motherboards for Intel are more expensive. The difference in price is easily made up by the difference in motherboard prices provided you are trying to build within a budget. So to claim these processors are cheaper is a bit misleading considering to use them properly, you have to spend more. Also, cooling is a bigger problem, so you'll likely need to spend more there as well. Overall this processor will cost you more, and so the truck example stands.

Kudos to Intel for taking the crown back from AMD, for now, but I just don't think this is as impressive as its being made out to be. That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.

I think an important difference vs Zen 3 is that when Zen 3 launched, it was better than Comet Lake at everything and offered an huge MT lead at a lower power consumption.
And all if this without any drawbacks. It really was dominating.

Rocket Lake did not change that (actually made things worse) but at least brought the platform up to the same level in terms of IO.

I‘d say overall ADL takes the crown, but it is still a mixed bag as it‘s not best at everything and has some drawbacks.
 
I think there are few points to make here. The Ryzen gen 3 is a year old now. So the expectation should be that Intel should win with a brand new processor. Also, electricity over time does have a cost. Sure 130 watts over an hour might only cost you around $0.02. But, let's say you have the processor for 4 years and you average running it at full power just 2 hours a day. That's around $60. Also these motherboards for Intel are more expensive. The difference in price is easily made up by the difference in motherboard prices provided you are trying to build within a budget. So to claim these processors are cheaper is a bit misleading considering to use them properly, you have to spend more. Also, cooling is a bigger problem, so you'll likely need to spend more there as well. Overall this processor will cost you more, and so the truck example stands.

Kudos to Intel for taking the crown back from AMD, for now, but I just don't think this is as impressive as its being made out to be. That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
Lmao, youve come up with a pretty unrealistic hypothetical scenario to demonstrate that it will cost you $60 over 3 years. I’m sorry but you won’t notice that, energy prices fluctuate by a lot more than that. Not to mention it’s nothing compared to the power consumption of heating etc. Its not worth spending more and losing performance on the 5950X.

Yeah the power consumption argument is laughable. If it’s that important you don’t buy either a 5950X or a 12900K. You buy a laptop or a T series Intel/GE class Ryzen. You could save literally hundreds of dollars over the same period that way.

I actually don’t think this is that impressive though, it’s expected. Had Intel failed to beat Ryzen 5000 we’d be raining criticism on them.

What would impress me is savage price cuts on Ryzen 5000, maybe some 1000 series pricing. That would benefit us consumers. Maybe that way AMD can restore their reputation. Currently they charge more than Intel for silicon and that’s just backwards.
 
Intel have destroyed AMD after just one year. The 12900K is significantly cheaper than the 5950X and it’s smoking it. This is where things should be, Ryzen 5000 is 2020 hardware. It should be par for the course for 2021 hardware to beat it.

Buyers won’t be put off by the power consumption. You don’t buy a top end unlocked K series CPU if you care about power efficiency. These Alder lake parts will outsell their competitors by an order of magnitude.

I look forward to seeing the benchmarks of the 12600K. Which I feel is a more realistic purchase for most people.
Destroyed would mean it was better in everything, that is not the case. AMD still wins in multicore average performance in content creating programs, while doing so it is also being more energy efficient, not hitting thoose insane 241watts. ADL does pull ahead in gaming for sure, but that lead looks to be alot smaller if not equaled with Zen 3D releasing in a few month.
It's good to see intel back in the game with their second attempt to tacle Zen 3 finally reaching it's level in general performance as long as you dont look at power consumption.
Taking into account the brand new architecture, the complexity that comes with it, DDR5, the power consumption I think it is slighty underwhelming tbh.
 
So you equate $60 over 4 years as being a considerable sum of money? That's not even 1 AAA video game at retail price...

And if you are looking to buy the best of the best - which is what Intel is claiming this CPU is... you SHOULD be spending more for it. That it retails for less than the 5950 is a nice bonus... had Intel not been getting its @ss handed to it for the past several years by AMD, rest assured this CPU would cost double.
$60 over 4 years is only one factor I pointed out. The others are more direct and immediate. It will be harder to cool, and it does require a more expensive motherboard to take full advantage of the CPU. You can get an X570 motherboard that is completely adequate for the 5950X for $180 and that's been since launch. The cheapest Z690 is around $250 and that is low end. Then with current DDR5 costs, that is another factor. Also, there is the PSU, which will cost you a bit more too as you'll likely want to buy one with 150-200 watts higher rating, especially if you want to do any overclocking. If you want maximum "AMD butt-kicking" performance out of this thing, you are going to pay for it. I don't care whether Intel or AMD is ahead, its not a big deal to me. I will replace my PC in a few more years, I don't have to have the latest and greatest at any given moment. I realize that the benefit of having a slightly faster process is negligible to what I'm doing with my PC 99% of the time. For me cost are always a factor because I look for the best performance to costs and right now this still is not it.

I agree with your last point though. This processor would be $1000 if AMD hadn't provided competition.
 
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Destroyed would mean it was better in everything, that is not the case. AMD still wins in multicore average performance in content creating programs, while doing so it is also being more energy efficient, not hitting thoose insane 241watts. ADL does pull ahead in gaming for sure, but that lead looks to be alot smaller if not equaled with Zen 3D releasing in a few month.
It's good to see intel back in the game with their second attempt to tacle Zen 3 finally reaching it's level in general performance as long as you dont look at power consumption.
Taking into account the brand new architecture, the complexity that comes with it, DDR5, the power consumption I think it is slighty underwhelming tbh.
You appear to have misread the review. The 12900K won in all tests except blender and Corona. Far more people use premiere pro than either of those programmes and also Intel only lost by a few percent, making it still better value.

Tbh though I’m not expecting the i9 to impress. It’s the i5 and i7 that I’m more interested in. Beating a 5950X is great and it’s sweetened by the fact that it’s cheaper. But no way am I spending this kind of money on a CPU myself.
 
So as predicted, the E cores are primarily there to artificially inflate the synthetics (Cinebench, etc) in the MOAR CORE number-chasing p*ssing contest

artificially inflate ??

Cinebench is 3d rendering benchmark used to evaluate Cinema 4D software performance. Basically, faster cinebench mean better rendering performance

(and even then Alder Lake seems to get thrashed by the Ryzens in 7zip, Corona, Blender, etc),

12900K outperformed 5900X in blender and Corona

7zip seems that only benchmark that did not benefits from E cores (maybe bug or 7zip failed to detect E cores) but for some reason DDR5 showed massive gains in compression (even beat 5950X) which is weird

whilst gaming benchmarks are barely 9% higher on average vs the 2 generation old i9-10900K, and at least part of that 9% includes "+20% higher" IPC & faster RAM? Also, no thank you to 355w CPU's.

Gaming benchmark could be GPU limited. CPU will not magically increase fps on GPU limited scenario

There is also cheaper alternative like 12700KF and 12600KF which is not much different in gaming performance anyway.
https://wccftech.com/review/intel-c...-wifi-g-skill-trident-z5-ddr5-6000-memory/13/

355w is total system draw and not CPU alone (even Ryzen like 5900X consumed 242 watt and we know that CPU itself don't consume that much)


Also, when gaming, it seems that 12900K does not consume any more power than Ryzen 5950X or 11900K and only slightly higher than 5900X

So high power consumption happen only in highly threaded productivity benchmark and not in gaming or normal usage (if you are gamers why power consumption in blender even matter for you !!!)


Some ideas for future articles - It would be nice to see 1. The benchmarks retested with the E cores disabled just to see how much 'improvement' is down to extra cores and how much is RAM / IPC, and 2. W10 vs W11 (for those who don't want to 'upgrade' to W11 but want to see how the scheduler would impact it, eg, potential problems with heavy game threads getting assigned to the 'wrong' cores).

If E cores are useless then explain how 8 P cores destroy 11900K and 10900K (10 core) in blender, cinebench and Corona ? And even beat 12 cores Ryzen 5900X

THe IPC and clock speed of P cores is not big enough to beat 12 zen2 cores.... Only way it could beat 12 zen3 cores if the E cores is useful
 
Destroyed would mean it was better in everything, that is not the case. AMD still wins in multicore average performance in content creating programs, while doing so it is also being more energy efficient, not hitting thoose insane 241watts. ADL does pull ahead in gaming for sure, but that lead looks to be alot smaller if not equaled with Zen 3D releasing in a few month.
It's good to see intel back in the game with their second attempt to tacle Zen 3 finally reaching it's level in general performance as long as you dont look at power consumption.
Taking into account the brand new architecture, the complexity that comes with it, DDR5, the power consumption I think it is slighty underwhelming tbh.
Looking at the relatively small IPC advancements going from Sandy to Ivy all the way to Skylake, perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised. AMD managed better going from Zen 1/+ to Zen 3. But Gelsinger is just starting out so let's see how the next couple years go.
 
Intel is back... with 25% higher price and 4% more gaming perf, not even mentioning higher power draw lol

You could even say same thing if you compare 12600KF to 5950X

Performance don't scale well with faster CPU.... So cheaper CPU will always better value for gaming than expensive CPU... Even a person with low IQ can understand that.

12900K (or12900KF which cost little less without iGPU) beats any AMD gaming CPU...... But if you have limited budget you can buy 12700KF or 12600KF as alternative instead of 5900X or 5800X

12400F should be better value for money if you do gaming only.
 
Except that gas actually costs money... a couple hundred watts costs almost nothing for people in North America....

Power requirements are really only an issue for mobile parts... for 99% of the purchasers of these PCs, they plug it in and forget all about the power it uses.
Nope. More power bring drawn will increase the wattage of the necessary PSU. Anyway, the main problem is the heat here.
 
I read an article which showed a cheaper 12900k beating out the more expensive 5950x in almost all tests. Which article did you read?
I seen article where newest Intel cpu in gaming in 1080p was -2 - 7% faster than 1 year old ryzen, where intel platform (not CPU alone) is more expensive, and where professional usage is hindered by high power consumption (and cost aside this will negatively impact work culture as you need to dissipate additional Watts). What article did you see? Or maybe "up to" 7% is for some reason big enough to call it 'destroying'?:) at average it is 3-4 % in 1080p, probably nearly nothing in 4k gaming.
This is only getting even, in no way this is "Intel have destroyed AMD" as you said. Upcoming zen 3 update will probably negate the game performance and reduce productivity difference with better and quieter system.
 
1 you can't overclock the 5950x enough to make it match as really none of the tip end chips have enough oc headroom these days to make it worthwhile.

2. The fact you forget about temps is that's only when doing very CPU intensive productivity tasks if you care about gaming (especially at 4) then the power usage is the same or possibly even Lower than what AMD is doing leading to the same or lower temps.
OK, it was just an example. Anyway, I don't want those Temps in my rig.
 
Looking at the relatively small IPC advancements going from Sandy to Ivy all the way to Skylake, perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised. AMD managed better going from Zen 1/+ to Zen 3. But Gelsinger is just starting out so let's see how the next couple years go.
Gelsinger doesn't make CPUs... and AMD only improved so much because there were so many improvements to be made for them - remember, until Zen, Intel was thrashing them!

Now, even when AMD was thrashing Intel, they only became the "gaming king" with the 5000 series - and only marginally...

Intel has boosted everything across the board - from being thrashed, they are now slightly ahead in almost everything, and what they still trail behind in, is only by a few % points.

Do I expect AMD to pass them with their next architecture? Certainly! But do I then expect Intel to "repass" them with theirs? Yep...

It's the next few years AFTER that will tell the tale. Will Intel proceed to begin "thrashing" AMD? They have deeper pockets and far more resources...

Hopefully, AMD does enough to at least stay in the same ballpark - keeping Intel from charging $2000 for a CPU again -I'm looking at you 6950X!!!
 
So you equate $60 over 4 years as being a considerable sum of money? That's not even 1 AAA video game at retail price...

And if you are looking to buy the best of the best - which is what Intel is claiming this CPU is... you SHOULD be spending more for it. That it retails for less than the 5950 is a nice bonus... had Intel not been getting its @ss handed to it for the past several years by AMD, rest assured this CPU would cost double.
Hey guy, forget about the price of electricity. More watts mean more heat and better cooling solution. This is the real problem.
 
Hey guy, forget about the price of electricity. More watts mean more heat and better cooling solution. This is the real problem.
But there are plenty of coolers that will handle the CPU without throttling... Will they cost more... YES... should that matter if you are purchasing a top-of-the-line CPU? NO!

You want practical, buy the i7 or i5...
 
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