12th Gen Intel Core i9 12900KS Review

launched in March of 2022, i9 12900Ks by Intel is a part of its 12th Generation Alder lake lineup for high-end desktops and workstations. It is powered by 8 high-power cores (Golden Cove Cores) and 8 power-efficient cores (Gracemont Cores) with the power-efficient Gracemont cores having a base clock of 2.4 GHz and a boost clock of 4GHz on the other hand the high-performance golden cove cores have a base clock of 3.2 GHz and a boost clock of 5.5 GHz. Based on Intel’s 10 nanometers architecture intel claims an IPC (instructions per cycle) gain of 19% compared to its predecessor Rocket Lake. According to Intel the base TDP (PL1) of the i9 12900Ks is 125 Watts and can be boosted up to TDP (PL2) of 241 Watts. Other key features include support for DDR4/DDR5 memory and overclocking support.

Intel UHD Graphics Xe 770

Intel UHD Graphics Xe 770 is based on intel’s Alder Lake GT1 10 nm Xe architecture powered by 256 shading units, 16 texture mapping units, and 8 ROPs. In terms of performance, it is very similar to its predecessor Intel UHD Graphics Xe 750, and is capable of playing games such as Apex legends at 40+ FPS at 720p and GTA 5 at 30+ FPS at low settings.

Benchmarks

The 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900KS is made to compete with AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The i9 12900KS is just the better version of the i9 12900K with the only difference being the TDP and Clock speed. Clock speeds are increased from 5.2GHz to 5.5GHz (Boost Clock) and 3.2 GHz to 3.4GHz (Base Clock). The TDP on the other hand goes from 125 Watts to 150 Watts. Now with increase of almost 6 percent in both base and boost clock, we are looking at similar performance increments of anywhere from 4-8 percent.

Geekbench

The GeekBench Single-core score can be used to estimate the real-world performance of day-to-day applications such as Ms word, Google Chrome, and several games. The GeekBench Multi-core score can be used to estimate the real-world performance of a CPU under professional workloads such as data compression, 2d/3d rendering, machine learning, and physics simulation(CAD applications).

Cinebench R23 Benchmark

Based on cinema 4d the Cinebench R23 measures CPU performance in animation, 3d-modeling, simulation, and rendering. Single-core performance measures the responsiveness of the software under active workloads while the multi-core score measures the CPU’s ability to handle tasks such as rendering, encoding, and other workloads that benefit from better multi-threaded performance.