Intel Core i9-12900K, 8C+8c/24T, 3.20-5.20GHz, boxed ohne Kühler

AMD schickt mit dem Ryzen 7 5800X3D die erste CPU mit 3D V-Cache ins Rennen. Wie viel zusätzliche Leistung der 64 MB große 3D V-Cache einem Gaming-PC mit RTX 3090 Ti bringt, klärt der Test. Neben dem Ryzen 7 5800X muss sich der „3D-Ableger“ auch gegen Intels aktuelle Flaggschiffe Core i9-12900K und Core i9-12900KS beweisen.

Welchen Einfluss hat die CPU auf die Spieleleistung, wenn die GPU limitiert? Keinen, möchte man vermuten. Manchmal stimmt das, manchmal aber auch nicht. Um zu beweisen, dass die CPU nicht ganz egal im GPU-Limit ist, haben wir den aktuellen Intel-Top-Prozessor Core i9-12900K mit einem i3-12100 verglichen. Diesmal nicht in 720p, sondern in Full HD, WQHD und UHD und das Ganze in drei Spielen. Herausgekommen sind teils erwartbare und teils seltsame Ergebnisse.

Der Prozessor setzt sich nahezu durchgehend an die Spitze und bietet vor allem im Vergleich zum Vorgänger einen Leistungssprung von durchschnittlich 40 % in Benchmarks und 15 % in Spielen. Durch die zusätzlichen Effizienz-Kerne kann der i9-12900K nun zudem wieder im Multi-Thread-Bereich auftrumpfen und mit AMD mithalten. Das erwartete Effizienzwunder ist der i9-12900K allerdings nicht.

Mit Intel Alder Lake debütieren nicht nur eine neue CPU-Architektur und PCI-Express 5.0, sondern auch DDR5-SDRAM. In diesem Artikel zeigen wir auf, wie groß die Leistungsunterschiede zwischen DDR4 und dem Nachfolgestandard ausfallen und unter welchen Umständen DDR5 die Nase ganz klar vorn hat.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 "Ada" was released last week, and put simply, it's the fastest graphics card you can buy right now—by a huge margin. Our continuing coverage of "Ada" spans nine graphics card reviews and a couple of feature articles. The RTX 4090 is a beast of a graphics card for 4K Ultra HD gaming—and 4K only. It's really hard to recommend this card to the 1440p crowd, even to those with higher refresh-rate monitors; and impossible to do so to those with 1080p. This is because the RTX 4090 is simply too fast a graphics card for modern processors to handle at lower resolutions, and we encounter CPU-bottlenecks in resolutions as high as 1440p, where the performance gap between the RTX 4090 and RTX 3090 narrows from 39% to 26%. As you lower the resolution your framerate increases. The RTX 4090 is able to sustain a very high frame-rate that is bottlenecked at the CPU, as the CPU isn't able to process frames fast enough. At higher resolutions, the bottleneck shifts to the GPU.

Intel's 12th Gen Intel Core "Alder Lake" processors mark the company doing away with thermal design power (TDP) as a specification reported to consumers. This is among many firsts introduced by these chips, such as heterogeneous multi-core, new-generation I/O, etc. Over the past several weeks, we've been studying various aspects of Alder Lake, and one lingering since our main launch-day review is the mysterious new power-management configuration of these processors.

Windows 11 is out, and comes as a free upgrade for Windows 10 users. Intel recently launched their 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors and declared that they work best with Windows 11. End of review, right? Nope. The new Windows 11 operating system isn't to everyone's liking, and even those on board are basically beta-testing the operating system for Microsoft as it is riddled with several bugs across the board. With Microsoft announcing that it will support (provide software updates for) Windows 10 up to 2025, there's plenty of time for a large section of people to wait it out until they're convinced they need to upgrade to Windows 11, or until Microsoft makes it increasingly hard for them to stay on Windows 10, which has happened before. This article is for everyone who wants the latest hardware, but isn't so sure about the latest software.

There is no doubt that choosing DDR5 gives you a faster overall experience than DDR4, but sticking to DDR4 isn't that big a performance loss, and more importantly, DDR4 does not significantly change the overall performance outlook of the Core i9-12900K against its competitors from the previous generation or the AMD camp.

The simple truth is that Alder Lake is an impressive processor series with an equally impressive (Z690) platform. All factors combined make this a truly worthwhile upgrade to a new ECO system. We do think that the Core i5 12600K might be more interesting for the vast majority of people, though I'll talk more about that in the 12600K review. The Core i9-12900K then, with its 16 cores and 24 threads. 8 P-Core (16 threads) and 8 E-Core (with 8 threads) the CPU absolutely delivers. The CPU has 30 MB L3 cache, 3 MB per core (Golden Cove) and 3 MB per cluster (E-Core) (Gracemont). That's 8 P-Cores for 24 MB and 6 MB from each of the two clusters of 4 E-Cores. The chip has 12.5 MB of L2 cache and 1.25 MB of L3 cache. That said, I am not imbued about the inclusion of energy-efficient cores as they just do not matter to me if it does not bring IDLE and low load power consumption down. Overall platform power consumption was substantially higher than what AMD offers. The thing that Intel does have going for it is of course the very fast single-threaded performance. When you look at multi-core performance the Intel is at Ryzen 5000 level with a differential here and there. IPC for the P cores is on par with the fastest Ryzen 5000 core if you clock them both at the same frequency. The thing is, Intel can clock them faster and does so longer (PL2); that's where the increased single-thread performance is deriving from. Motherboard manufacturers are free to configure that PL2 state as they please btw. This will invoke a lot of variety in energy consumption. Allow me to focus on AMD for a second. They gained huge popularity by expanding on their ecosystem, the Ryzen 5000 release wasn't about the processor solely, it was all about the platform and of course PCIe Express 4.0 support, being first with new technology matters advancing that very same ecosystem, as it gives you a technology lead. Intel is now applying the very same idea, and ups it a notch as the inclusion of DDR5 support and PCIe Express 5.0 support, both are super interesting. While PCI-Express 5.0 might take a bit longer to adapt to, you do get PCIe Gen 4.0 backward compatibility, and that opens up a plethora of storage functionality. We do wonder how long will it take before we see 16GB/sec performing NVMe M.2 SSDs. Transitioning to DDR5 of course will deliver an effect much faster, gaming for example, or database workload-intensive applications. So in that respect, Intel is absolutely an industry leader with a more future-ready platform. Fact is also, the price of admission being first with technology is going to hurt your wallet. To bypass that fact a little, there will be DDR4 compatible motherboards as well, it might help you transition a bit easier. All in all; the accumulation of it all (CPU/Motherboard/New Tech) the platform aside from relatively high power consumption is absolutely impressive. A completely new architecture with improved IPC and terrific performance, we believe will encourage many people to make the switch to Alder Lake. It supports PCIe Gen 4.0 and 5.0, as well as DDR5 memory and WIFI6E for premium motherboards, which we believe will encourage even more people to make the switch with super-fast CPU-bound game performance in mind. Right now, it appears that the Core i9 12900K will sell for $589,- at retail, which is a reasonable amount of money to spend on something that is, in essence, an eight-core CPU with eight "slower cores." The reality is that Intel manages to keep the 5900X and 5950X well within striking distance, which is both a statement and a testament to the work that Intel has performed here.