Intel 12th Gen Core i9-12900K review: The new "best" gaming processor

Note: This review was first published on 4 November 2021.

Intel’s long-awaited 12th-generation of processors have arrived, and boy, has it arrived with a big bang. When AMD launched their Ryzen 5000 series last year, it wrested away Intel’s final grasp on the gaming performance space, with their Ryzen 9 5900X beating out their blue competitor’s 10th Gen Core i9-10900K in both single-core and multi-core benchmarks. To rub salt to Intel’s wounds, it even bested Intel’s incumbent top processor that only came out the first half of this year, the 11th Gen Core i9-11900K, in most areas.

With the arrival of the 12th Gen Core i9-12900K however, Intel finally has a processor that not only bested AMD’s best in the realm of gaming performance, but also comes with a companion chipset that truly takes PC gaming technology to the next level in 2022.

New processor, new companion chipset

Our editor-in-chief Vijay has covered in detail on what makes the 12th Gen Core ticks as compared to previous generations of Intel processors, and crucially, how Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 has more fine-grain support for it as well. You can (and should) read about them in the links below:

• Intel unwraps Alder Lake performance hybrid scalable architecture for desktops and notebooks
• Intel unveils 12th Gen Core Alder Lake desktop processors with six "K" SKU processors

The TL;DR version of is that Intel has decided to launch their latest high-performance hybrid design multi-core processor microarchitecture, Alder Lake, for desktop enthusiasts as opposed to previous generations when the company would do so for their mobile processors first. Since Intel’s desktop parts are finally moving to a new process node with a brand-new architecture, they want to lead with their highest performing models before filling out the rest of the series.

Before I jump to the fun part of this feature, it would be remiss of me to not talk about the new top-end companion chipset – the Intel Z690. Part of what makes Alder Lake and by extension, the Core i9-12900K, exciting is that it brings with it new capabilities like DDR5 and PCIe 5.0. This, unfortunately, means you will be looking at a substantial investment in procuring a new motherboard, DDR5 memory, and very soon, PCIe components like SSD and even the next generation of GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD.

To benchmark our Alder Lake processors, ASUS sent over their latest ROG Maximus Z690 Hero motherboard and from the photo above, we can quickly see that the 12th Gen Core uses the new and larger LGA-1700 socket. Interestingly, the new socket is expected to support up to three generations of Intel Core processors, possibly in a bid to compete with AMD’s purported Socket AM5 for platform longevity. Cross your fingers.

I’ll be reviewing the ROG Maximus Z690 Hero separately, but I do want to interrupt my Core i9-12900K review to highlight a couple of understated features that ASUS has brought to their latest motherboard.

The first is a notch that latches onto your SSD drives without the need for a screw. It allows for replacements of SSD in a quick and hassle-free manner – it’s actually a great feature for testers more than end-users, to be honest.

Next, ASUS has also added what they called a “PCIe Slot Q-Release”. As the name implies, it’s a button that you push to release a graphics card on the first PCIe slot. This negates having to use a long tool, such as a screwdriver, to push the PCIe lever down. Again, it’s a wonderful and convenient tool for testers like myself.

I’ve got to commend ASUS for putting out such quality-of-life improvements onto their motherboards (I’m sure these will appear on some of their other Z690 models as well), apart from just adding on accessories that, quite frankly, are more gimmicky than functional.

All about core power and efficiency

The 12th Gen Core processors are all about offering both Performance (larger P cores) and Efficiency (smaller E cores) cores, and according to Intel, takes advantage of the new Windows 11’s optimization for Intel Thread Director, which supposedly allows it to better manage tasks across these new CPU cores by offloading background tasks and keeping the performance cores for the more demanding workloads – such as gaming and content creation.

In short, Intel is saying that Alder Lake works better on Windows 11 than on Windows 10. In the interest of time, I will do a comparison of the Core i9-12900K’s performance on both OSes in a separate feature. For now, I will focus purely on the processor’s performance in gaming and content creation.

Here’s how Intel's top 2021 processor for gamers and content creators stack up, along with AMD's and the older Core i9-11900K for comparison:-

Performance Benchmarks

What makes the Core i9-12900K processor (and its 12th Gen siblings) so interesting is that the P cores are clocked at 3.2GHz, boosted up to 5.2GHz, while the E cores are clocked at a slower 2.4GHz with 3.9GHz maximum Turbo frequency. This pretty much means that TDP as a reliable value of a processor’s power or thermal characteristics is no longer reliable in Intel’s case. Instead, we now have a more upfront knowledge of the power bands that these new processors operate at. In the case of the Core i9-12900K, the “base power” is 125W and its “maximum boost power” aka its maximum power drawn at boost frequency is 241W.

It’s almost a given expectations that the Core i9-12900K leapfrog its disappointing 11th Gen Core i9-11900K, but will it slay the current reigning CPU of choice for gamers, the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X? Let’s look at the benchmarks here.

Gaming Performance

I've stuck the specifications for each of the three systems as close as possible, and using the best available components. So, while memory count is 32GB across the board, the Core i9-12900K gets the newer DDR5 versus DDR4 for the other two. XMP is turned off for all platforms, and I've also use NVIDIA's gaming flagship - the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card - so we get to see the best gaming performance from each system.

My game list includes a mixture of old and recent games new test processor performance. The focus will be on CPU performance, where possible, like Ashes of Singularity: Escalation and Horizon Zero Dawn. The list isn’t exhaustive by any measure but there are enough different game engines and APIs variety to give us an idea of broader performance trends. Lastly, I've also turned on ray tracing where possible.

• Guardians of the Galaxy (ray tracing)
• Ashes of the Singularity - CPU
• Horizon Zero Dawn - CPU
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider (ray tracing)
• Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition (ray tracing)
• Total War: Three Kingdoms (Battle mode)

1080p benchmarking is a great measure of a CPU’s prowess, no thanks in part to high-performance gaming cards such as the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti used in the benchmarks here. You see, at lower resolutions, the GPU can process and transfer data much quicker than at higher resolutions. A CPU bottleneck happens here because the processor cannot keep up with the processing speed of the graphics card. The CPU, after all, is responsible for processing real-time game actions, physics, UI, audio and other complex CPU-bound processes.

Conversely, the opposite happens at higher resolutions when the GPU takes more time to process the higher data load (more textures, etc..) and becomes the bottleneck. With 1440p, we start to see this happening, where the difference in performances pared down - although the i9-12900K still leads here. Then in the 4K benchmark results, we can see how all four processors achieved performance parity because, at such high-resolution, it’s what graphics card you use that matters.

In short, the results here pretty much speaks for itself. The Core i9-12900K not only crushes the Ryzen 9 5900X, but convincingly too in almost all of the games tested. There are a couple of take-aways from this. Firstly, unlike the i9-11900K, which could only barely catch up to the 5900X at launch, the new Intel processor looks like it will have a lot of mileage left in its tank for the next few years to come. That, and the new technologies that the Z690 chipset (for example, DDR5 and PCIe 5.0) offers also makes the i9-12900K the processor of the moment that you can invest in without having to worry about it becoming obsolete.

Office, Content Creation and Rendering

While Intel has clearly marked the 12th Gen Core i9-12900K as a gaming processor, games are aren’t always a true measure of a CPU's capabilities – especially when it comes to sizing up the processors’ core performance. For non-gaming benchmarks, I’ve used CineBench R20 and CPU Mark to measure all four processors single-core and multi-core theoretical throughput standings. SYSmark 25 and PugetBench for Adobe Premiere Pro are great benchmark as it runs real-world applications and mimics workloads.

Right off the bat I can tell you these results are very impressive. The Core i9-12900K manages to make the Ryzen 9 5900X looks slow, especially in applications that takes advantage of multi-core - or shall we rightly say, the P-cores. These big cores look pretty fast, especially in Adobe. What I can't quite say here is how much of a performance improvement DDR5 affords over DDR4. I do have a Gigabyte Z690 Aorus motherboard that runs on DDR4 instead, and I will share this observation in a separate piece.

Final Thoughts

The last couple of years have not been too kind to Intel, with competitor AMD wresting away the gaming crown with its Ryzen 9 5900X processor, and others like NVIDIA encroaching in their enterprise space or losing the lucrative Apple business (who went on to develop their own impressive silicon, the M1). But in terms of the competition from its main rival AMD, Intel finally not only has a processor that can outperformed AMD's equivalent best in games but also in productivity workloads. 

To say that the 12th Gen Core i9-12900K is a huge improvement over the 11th Gen Core i9-11900K is an understatement. It's a marvelous piece of tech alongside the new companion Z690 chipset. That said, all this performance gain comes at a price: at full loads the i9-12900K draws more than 240W of power. That also translates to heat, and the processor runs really hot in my benchmarks. I can't imagine using anything but a good AIO cooler with it.

Pricewise, Intel has slapped an SRP of US$589 on the i9-12900K but as with the current challenge in getting a CPU or GPU at its recommended price, it's highly unlikely retailers will be letting go of this processor at that price. But know that if you do get to own one, you'll have the best gaming (and also for other workloads) processor in your PC. You will also want to have the fastest GeForce RTX card to pair it with in order to maximise its power.

Last but not least, it's been an immense task getting these benchmark results out - a task that wasn't made easier with the Windows 11 and AMD debacle. So yes, there are more features to come pertaining to Intel's 12th Gen Cores, including one on DDR4's performance on the Core i9-12900K, a review for the Core i5-12600K processor, as well as for the ROG Maximus Z690 Hero and Gigabyte's Z690 Aorus Extreme. This is just the beginning of our coverage for Alder Lake. Stay tuned.

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