The Intel Core i9-12900KS Review: The Best of Intel's Alder Lake, and the Hottest
by Gavin Bonshor on July 29, 2022 8:00 AM ESTCPU Benchmark Performance: Power, Office, and Science
Our previous set of ‘office’ benchmarks have often been a mix of science and synthetics, so this time we wanted to keep our office section purely on real-world performance.
For the remainder of the testing in this review of the Core i7-12700K and i5-12600K, we are using DDR5 memory at the following settings:
- DDR5-4800(B) CL40
Power
Compared directly to the Core i9-12900K, the Core i9-12900KS does draw more power in our Peak Power test, albeit not immensely more. Because Intel has assigned the chip the same 241W PL1 limit as the original 12900K, in TDP-constrained scenarios both chips are held to a similar limit. Still, with a figure of 276.44 W, this is considerably more than other processors including all of AMD's premium 5000-series offerings, and Intel's 12th Gen Core i5 and i7 processors.
Office
In our Agisoft Photoscan 1.3 benchmark, the Core i9-12900KS is around 1.5% better than the regular i9-12900K, and considerably quicker than the rest on test.
Science
In our science-based benchmarks, the Core i9-12900KS and the Core i9-12900K trade blows which is to be expected with two similar processors, albeit the extra core clock speeds on the i9-12900KS do not show as much benefit as the price difference would suggest.
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DazFG - Friday, July 29, 2022 - link
performance per watt for these CPUs is abismall!bug77 - Friday, July 29, 2022 - link
Which is weird, because high-end CPUs (and GPUs, for that matter) are usually hallmarks of efficiency. Right?But yeah, Alder Lake can take so much punishment, your PSU might cave in before the CPU does...
techjunkie123 - Friday, July 29, 2022 - link
Sadly AMD is also headed in this direction with their new CPUs (Zen 4)...... 5.5 GHz and 70% higher TDP for what, 40% or so better MT performance?Apples high end CPU and GPU performance scales quite well with power. They just throw a lot more silicon at the problem, but it is effective.
tamalero - Sunday, July 31, 2022 - link
Eyup, this is another Netburst..bennyg - Monday, August 8, 2022 - link
When you get up to 5ghz, yeah, but OC has always been that way, turbo boost is just factory auto OCDown at 80W in mobile the perf per watt looks far better for the 6p8e parts
It's all Ohm's fault for that law of his
blanarahul - Friday, July 29, 2022 - link
Huh. Makes you wonder how a stock 12900KS would perform under Dry Ice since I doubt any phase change cooler can keep up with the 400 watt heat output.ddhelmet - Friday, July 29, 2022 - link
Factoria updates per seconds are too low.healbunny - Friday, July 29, 2022 - link
stock voltage is way too high, please try undervolt. my 12900ks with undervolt able to get P core all core 5.3Ghz, Ecore 4.2Ghz (vcore 1.2v). 2 core boost is 5.6Ghz at 1.3v vcore. All core full load in cinebench r23 consume 240w, cpu package temperature around 80C. Single core consume around 48W, 53C. (using Msi K360 aio). Score for R23, multi 30006 pts, single 2143pts.Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 30, 2022 - link
You are clearly unfamiliar with their justification for only using JEDEC RAM settings. Undervolting is more complex than picking a vetted XMP profile.Carls Car - Saturday, July 30, 2022 - link
healbunny didn't mention XPM at all.