More Intel Core i9-12900K Alder Lake CPU synthetic and gaming benchmarks have leaked out in widely used tests. The CPU has been getting new benchmarks ever since the qualification samples were released in public.
Intel Core i9-12900K Alder Lake CPU Benchmarked In Synthetic & Gaming Tests, Faster Than AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
The first benchmarks come from Bilibili's member, Enthusiast Citizen, who has actively been bench-marking the Intel Core i9-12900K retail unit for a while now. The leaker has provided several Alder Lake benchmarks and now, he submitted a review of the Radeon RX 6600 on a Core i9-12900K test bench. Now it doesn't make any sense to submit a review on an unreleased platform with bugs but that's what the leaker did.
The test platform featured what looks to be an ASRock Z690 Steel Legend motherboard based on the heatsink design and white/silver colors. It was running ZADAK's DDR5-3866 memory in Gear 1 mode with CL14-14-14-34-2T timings. A standard tower heatsink cooler was used to cool to the i9-12900K and tested on an open-air bench.
Intel Core i9-12900K Alder Lake Flagship CPU Specifications
Intel's Core i9-12900K Alder Lake-S CPU will rock 16 cores and 24 threads. That's arranged in 8 P-Core (with 16 threads) and 8 E-Core (with 8 threads). The CPU features 30 MB of L3 cache which is arranged in 3 MB per core partitions on the P-Core (Golden Cove) and 3 MB per cluster on the E-Core (Gracemont). That's 8 P-Cores for 24 MB from the P-Cores and 6 MB from the two clusters comprising 4 E-Cores each. There's also 1.25 MB of L2 cache for a total of 12.5 MB on the entire chip.
As for clock speeds, the Intel Core i9-12900K is expected to feature a P-Core base and boost clocks of 3.2 GHz / 5.3 GHz and E-Core base and boost clocks of 3.0 / 3.9 GHz. These boost clocks are for a single-core. The all-core boost frequencies are expected to be 5.0 GHz for the P-Core and 3.7 GHz for the E-Core. The upper speeds will be achieved only when TVB (Thermal Velocity Boost) has been activated so normal boost speeds might be a little lower.
Intel Core i9-12900K Alder Lake Flagship CPU Performance
In terms of performance, the leaker first shows off the synthetic performance of the Intel Core i9-12900K in 3DMark Time Spy and Fire Strike benchmarks. The performance metrics are provided below:
3DMark TimeSpy CPU (Higher is Better)
As for gaming benchmarks, the only comparative performance benchmark was done in Forza Horizon 4. The Intel Core i9-12900K scored 193 FPS at 1080p while running on Windows 11 & AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X scored 189 FPS with the same settings but running on Windows 10. The Windows 10 OS for AMD CPUs makes sense since Ryzen chips have performance degradation issues related to the L3 cache which adversely affects gaming performance and hence the best performance is only measurable in Windows 10. This is a small 2% lead over the Ryzen 9 5950X.
Other benchmarks for the Intel Core i9-12900K included Rainbow Six Siege which scored 252 FPS at 1080p and Shadow of The Tomb Raider which scored 112 FPS at 1080p. Unfortunately, the leaker did not provide any comparisons in these gaming tests.
Intel's Alder Lake Desktop CPUs will feature both DDR5 and DDR4 memory controllers and 600-series motherboards will also come with DDR5/DDR4 specific options. High-end motherboards will retain DDR5 while the more mainstream offerings will open up DDR4 support too. The Intel Alder Lake CPU lineup is expected to launch in November along with the respective Z690 platform and DDR5 memory kits.
News Source: HXL
