Intel’s 12th-gen Core i9 is the fastest laptop CPU ever in our early tests
Intel’s Core i9-12900HK indeed fulfils the company’s proclamation of being the “The fastest mobile processor. Ever”, based on the results of our early, exclusive hands-on performance testing of several 12th generation laptops.
Our colleagues at PCWorld recently took four nearly identical laptops outfitted with the Core i9-12900HK for a spin. While the four pre-production laptops aren’t quite final units, they are based on MSI’s GE76 Raider with final drivers, firmware and tuning still to come. The laptops were outfitted with the 14-core Core i9-12900HK CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU, 32GB of DDR5/4800 RAM and Windows 11. The updated GE76 remains the same externally as the previous-gen model, but there have been some upgrades to it, including a new MSI ‘phase-change liquid metal’ thermal pad that boosts the CPU’s performance. MSI has also tweaked the 12th gen laptop’s GPU to 175 watts, versus the 11th generation version’s 165 watt TGP GPU.
All but the gaming benchmarks were run on laptops set to MSI’s balanced profile, rather than its extreme performance profile, and also set to hybrid GPU mode rather than discrete mode. That’s actually how Intel set the laptops up in its lab, which were left intact. Normally our testers would opt for the higher performance profile to get the best possible performance, but they left them as set and just wanted to point it out to shoot down assumptions that Intel might have ‘rigged’ this performance preview by opting for the maximum cooling settings.
Our colleagues picked the tests they wanted to run, but make no mistake – these are laptops from Intel’s own testing labs, so you should always read the results with some modicum of salt until independent reviews are performed. We do believe that the
