Intel Core i9-12900K: Intel. Is. Back.
Everyone likes redemption stories, and Intel’s 12th-gen Core i9-12900K is a comeback story for the ages. The once mighty and complacent champ was defeated years ago, forced through one humiliating loss after another at the hands of AMD’s resurgent Ryzen processors, until finally somehow finding a way back to fighting form and claiming victory once again. Fade to black and cue the credits.
Life (and technology) never has that Hollywood ending, but Intel’s Core i9-12900K gets pretty damned close. After years of being pummeled by AMD processors, the 12900K’s performance makes it the far better CPU for most people than its bitter rival, the Ryzen 9 5950X. No, it’s not a knock-out victory by any means, but considering where it excels and the features it packs, Intel’s 12th-gen Alder Lake processor is the CPU to buy today if you’re in the market for a high-end desktop processor.
WHAT IS 12TH-GEN ALDER LAKE?
You’ll want to read our coverage of Intel’s 12th-gen Alder Lake reveal for the full nitty-gritty details of the radical new architecture, but it’s essentially a hybrid CPU design built on the Intel 7 process. That alone is a huge deal; after spending over half a decade mired on 14nm transistor technology, Alder Lake finally leaps up a node. (Intel 7 used to be called 10nm before a rebrand.) It mixes newly designed high-performance CPU cores with smaller, more efficient cores to achieve an optimal balance of performance-to-power ratios. Ever since rumors of Alder Lake first leaked, people (including ourselves) have wondered just what Intel was thinking by mixing its long-anticipated upgraded cores with “Atom-like” efficiency cores. But a better way to think of Alder Lake is that it’s Intel’s first “Intel 7” process desktop CPU with a completely redesigned big core, and for good measure, a bunch of extra efficiency cores that can perform as well as its previous 10th-gen cores thrown in too. 12th-gen Alder Lake also ushers in a new era of features, including PCIe 5.0, DDR5 memory, and a new LGA1700 socket.
HOW WE TESTED
For this review, we’ll be focusing on the main event, dialing in on the performance of Intel’s Core i9-12900K. Our review of the Core i5-12600K will soon follow. With the introduction of Windows 11 and its associated teething issues, it’s been a bit of a messy review cycle. In the end, though, a new patch and drivers that have corrected Ryzen 5000’s issues on the new OS meant we conducted our tests only in Windows 11 today.
While we were testing, popular Youtube channel Hardware Unboxed reported that it had run into an issue where AMD’s Windows 11 L3 cache bug returned if a processor swap was conducted with Ryzen. We fortunately didn’t run into it, but it felt worth mentioning. And for those who would scream, “Testing should only be done on Windows 10 for Ryzen!” Hardware Unboxed also noted that Windows 11 performance is generally 5 percent better for Ryzen than Windows 10’s.
For the AMD Ryzen system, we used an MSI MEG X570 Godlike board updated with latest BIOS and 64GB of DDR4/3600 Corsair Dominator dual-rank RAM. AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive feature was set to auto and we selected the AMP memory overclocking profile.
For the Intel Core system, we used an Asus ROG selected.
