Again that means dealing with the RAM’s deeply unimpressive 40-40-40-77 timings, though its 4800MHz frequency helps counterbalance such high latency to the point of broad comparison with our usual DDR4 RAM. To find out, I set it up in the same test bench that I used for our Intel Core i5-12600K review, including the Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero ( £520 / $600) motherboard and 16GB of Geil Polaris RGB DDR5 memory. As expensive as the Core i9-12900K is, it’s still cheaper than the 5950X, so could it be the new aspirational CPU to beat? And yet Intel’s i9 parts have always delivered the goods when it comes to at-all-costs gaming performance, with not even the mighty AMD Ryzen 9 5950X quite matching up in games even as it spanks Intel in multitasking. Motherboard chipset: 600 series (Z690, more to come)įor a gaming PC, this looks like lunacy – the endearingly ambitious kind, but lunacy nonetheless.

Max Turbo Boost speed: 5.2GHz (P-cores), 3.9GHz (E-cores).Base clock speed: 3.2GHz (P-cores), 2.4GHz (E-cores).The Core i9-12900K takes this opportunity to bulk up, combining eight P-cores and E-cores apiece for a total of 16 cores and 24 threads. Led by this, the Intel Core i9-12900K, Alder Lake sees the adoption of a hybrid architecture that combines high-power Performance cores (P-cores) with Efficiency cores (E-cores) that can free up headroom by taking on background tasks. By now you’ve probably heard about how Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs shake up the previously stagnant Core line.

Intel extreme tuning utility vs bios