Intel 12th Generation buying guide

After a few years of ceding the high ground, Intel is back to being the market leader. 12th Generation CPUs have now reset the market. The move to a hybrid architecture featuring big and little cores along with their impressive IPC gains, plus the shift to a superior 10nm process (officially known as Intel 7), means there are huge gains in single-threaded and multi-threaded performance.

There are a number of other technological improvements and generational shifts including the debut of DDR5 memory and PCI Express 5.0 along with the introduction of a new socket – LGA 1700 and of course, new motherboards to support it all. The first of these are based on the new Z690 chipset. We have a roundup of four tasty high-end options in the following pages.

There are many things to consider when planning your 12th Gen system. We’ll go through everything you need to get your build up and running. There are cooling considerations, motherboards that offer DDR4 or DDR5, overclocking capabilities and more. Then there’s the imminent release of more mainstream 12th Gen CPUs and more affordable motherboards in early 2022. That’s before we start thinking about Windows 11, which is important to extract the best out of Alder Lake. There’s a lot to unpack! Let’s dive straight