News Intel Core i9-12900KS Review: The Fastest Gaming Chip Ever

[Admin]

We put Intel's new Core i9-12900KS through the testing wringer to see if it earns its $739 price tag.

Intel Core i9-12900KS Review: The Fastest Gaming Chip Ever : Read more

 

[Colif]

until the next one...

ever? is time going to end now?

 

[hotaru251]

i'd take a slower cpu, lose max of 5% frames, and not burn my cpu out in few yrs due to uncontrolalble temps.

 

[TerryLaze]

i'd take a slower cpu, lose max of 5% frames, and not burn my cpu out in few yrs due to uncontrolalble temps.

Temps are automatically controlled by the CPU itself at 100 degrees (which is 10% below what the CPU can take) and that goes for any intel CPU.
Also temps at those levels are determined by Vcore and the KS is a better bin so it will use less Vcore.
Bottom line, if you push the S and non-s to the same clocks the S one will use less Vcore and be cooler.
Still not worth the increase in money, but also nothing to do with higher temps.

 

[VforV]

Intel's Special Edition hits 5.5 GHz with ease.

But at what cost?
Oh, here it is:

The peak 305W of power consumption we recorded has an impact on thermals, which regularly stay at 100C under heavy multi-core loads.

And this:

...
12900K's thousand-unit price (effectively the wholesale MSRP) lands at $739, so we can expect to see these chips at retail for around $775 to $800 at launch.
That's a surprising premium over the 16-core 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X that now retails for around $600, and it's also much more expensive than the $449 Ryzen 7 5800X3D...

If this Alder Lake pushed to the extreme does not beat 5800X3D, it will be the laughing stock of everyone. So intel absolutely needs to win.

That being said, I think they will beat 5800X3D, but if it's just a 5% difference in favor of 12900KS, then that is still very very bad, because all the other pluses will be with the 5800X3D.

Intel needs to beat the 5800X3D with at least +10% more performance in gaming for this CPU to make SOME sense with all those minuses stated above.

P.S. This just occurred to me how similar situation is this with the 3090Ti vs RX 6950 XT situation and how nvidia is in the the exact same spot with 3090 Ti (like intel with 12900KS) vs AMD (again) with their 6950XT (like with their 5800X3D). Can anyone spot the 2 desperate companies here?

 

[Johnpombrio]

Like Hot said, I decided to get an i7-12700K simply due to wanting to run the CPU on air. I got a decent 4.7GHz Performance and what? 4GHz on E cores with a 70C temp on a Cooler Master Hyper 212 black RGB air cooler with one fan. I literally cannot hear the cooler fan spin up when under full load. I was able to get it up to 5GHz but it was too hot on air. I could never tell the difference anyway.
What did make a difference was having my Samsung 980 Pro NVME finally running at full speed and having an EVGA RTX 3080Ti FTW3 which also is very quiet and stays under 75C under benchmarks. My memory is at 65C which I was surprised after reading the article about using a copper shim over the memory modules if/when they run hot.
Overall, I am very satisfied with my first purchase of an Intel chip that was not at the top of its class.

 

[hotaru251]

Bottom line, if you push the S and non-s to the same clocks the S one will use less Vcore and be cooler.
Still not worth the increase in money, but also nothing to do with higher temps.

duh?
thats a no brainer given the S are special binned for that exact reason.

my point was for daily rig nobody wants to run their CPU @ 100 degrees long term.

Only niche target who could justify S cpu's would be ppl who are really into XOC.

 

[-Fran-]

If Intel is only going to give 1 year warranties on these, that's all you need to know. You'd have to be the biggest imbecile in history if you don't take that 100°C operational temp as a red flag with these.

Well, inb4 mental gymnastics galore.

Regards.

 

[TerryLaze]

duh?
thats a no brainer given the S are special binned for that exact reason.

my point was for daily rig nobody wants to run their CPU @ 100 degrees long term.

Only niche target who could justify S cpu's would be ppl who are really into XOC.

Nobody runs prime95 with no power limit daily long term...
You overclock when you run things that can benefit from overclocking, you don't run overclocking just to produce heat.

 

[jacob249358]

cpu that pulls more power than my whole PC. How do you even cool this thing? liquid nitrogen? dropping ice cubes in your pump?

 

[FunSurfer]

i9-12900KS + RTX4090 - I feel sorry for the Koalas...

 

[jacob249358]

Dare I say it, but maybe intel needs to get some of apple's tactics with power efficiency being a thing.

 

[mdd1963]

Far Cry 6 shows some pretty darn impressive CPU-scaling, with pretty substantial jumps upward in FPS (up to 47% increase from 12600K to 12900KS) as one works their way up from the 'lowly' 12600K up through the assorted tiers of available CPUs.

 

[escksu]

cpu that pulls more power than my whole PC. How do you even cool this thing? liquid nitrogen? dropping ice cubes in your pump?

How?? 250W TDP is nothing for overclockers. FYI, overclocked AMD CPUS can hit just as much, if not more power. highly overclocked 5950x hit 300W easily.

 

[escksu]

i'd take a slower cpu, lose max of 5% frames, and not burn my cpu out in few yrs due to uncontrolalble temps.

If you are worried about such things, that the CPU is not for you. These are flagship CPUs meant for overclockers who can afford it.

 

[jacob249358]

If you are worried about such things, that the CPU is not for you. These are flagship CPUs meant for overclockers who can afford it.

No, it's meant to make sure intel holds onto the best performance crown for marketing.

 

[jacob249358]

How?? 250W TDP is nothing for overclockers. FYI, overclocked AMD CPUS can hit just as much, if not more power. highly overclocked 5950x hit 300W easily.

305 watts. Something tells me that overclockers will remove power limits. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/overclocking-5950x-to-6-ghz-16-cores
This guy here said the 5950x at 6.05ghz hit around 300 watts so I don't think your quote of ¨highly overclocked 5950x hit 300W easily.¨ is valid.

 

[spongiemaster]

305 watts. Something tells me that overclockers will remove power limits. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/overclocking-5950x-to-6-ghz-16-cores
This guy here said the 5950x at 6.05ghz hit around 300 watts so I don't think your quote of ¨highly overclocked 5950x hit 300W easily.¨ is valid.

300W is what he was hitting when binning the chips at 4.8Ghz at 1.35V. That was not the 6Ghz wattage which he didn't list, but mentioned the CPU voltage was 1.68V. That would push the wattage past 305.

 

[watzupken]

If Intel is only going to give 1 year warranties on these, that's all you need to know. You'd have to be the biggest imbecile in history if you don't take that 100°C operational temp as a red flag with these.

Well, inb4 mental gymnastics galore.

Regards.

I agree. The very fact that Intel has reduced their 3 years warranty to just a year says a lot of things about it. True that this chip is going to be meant for the ultra enthusiasts, and/or, for extreme overclocking, but the same can be said about the 12900K. So why the disparity in warranty duration?

 

[watzupken]

No, it's meant to make sure intel holds onto the best performance crown for marketing.

This is like saying, “Hey Apple and AMD, I have a product that outperforms yours!”. Oh it only takes 2x the power of the 5950X and 5x of the M1 Ultra. In a nutshell, they won 3 awards at the same time, namely, performance, space heater and power hungry CPU.

 

[TerryLaze]

I agree. The very fact that Intel has reduced their 3 years warranty to just a year says a lot of things about it. True that this chip is going to be meant for the ultra enthusiasts, and/or, for extreme overclocking, but the same can be said about the 12900K. So why the disparity in warranty duration?

Because warranty means that intel would have to provide a chip as an replacement and these are extremely rare, binned chips that are in extremely high demand and extremely low supply.
They just can't stockpile enough of them to provide a long warranty, they don't want to still be binning these chips in one or two years.

 

[Chris Fetters]

Lol, what a freaking joke.... 2x the power draw of a 1.5 year old Ryzen 9 5950X (which costs significantly less atm & ESPECIALLY for a whole platform) for basically the same performance in stuff you ACTUALLY buy a CPU like this for... 😑 ... This is only interesting to me for the sheer BANAYNAYS factor of a shipping part having clock-speeds this high... That's it.

And if talking about STRICTLY gaming performance, lol this isn't going to be even CLOSE to enough to knocking out Zen 3D, assuming AMD wasn't just COMPLETELY LYING OUT THEIR ASS with their 1080p gaming performance estimates!

(Aka, that at 1080p the 8c/16t R7 5800X3D's about +15% faster ON AVERAGE vs the 12c/24t R9 5900X. [Which was already a teeny-tiny bit faster at gaming than a vanilla R7 5800X, so it should be like ≈+16-17% over that.])

This ridiculously stupid & grossly overpriced i9-12900KS can't even break +10% faster on average over the R9 5900X over a wide variety of titles at 1080p! Instead, it just takes the OG i9-K's ≈+5% advantage over Zen 3 up to a like ≈+7-8% one... Whoopdie freaking doo.... 😑

So unless AMD was literally BS'ing their performance numbers by a literal factor of TWO TIMES (!!! Aka that Zen 3D's actually only ≈+7-8% faster on average vs Zen 3 at 1080p, NOT +15%), they should have absolutely NOTHING to worry about in the "flagship gaming performance" market. 🤷‍♂️

My biggest worry in regards to "flagship gaming CPU's" is that R7 5800X3D stock is going to be basically NON-EXISTENT, not that it won't take back the gaming crown (which I COMPLETELY expect it to do).

 

[TerryLaze]

So unless AMD was literally BS'ing their performance numbers by a literal factor of TWO TIMES (!!! Aka that Zen 3D's actually only ≈+7-8% faster on average vs Zen 3 at 1080p, NOT +15%), they should have absolutely NOTHING to worry about in the "flagship gaming performance" market. 🤷‍♂️

An average is only applied to a group of results, you change the group you change the average.
AMD's 15% average is for a grand total of 6 games...
The actual changes in performance range from 40% to ZERO.
This makes sense because some games can use more cache and some games can't, if they can't there won't be any average improvement.
So yeah, the 5800x3d will be better at some games, the ones that can use more cache, but all the others will run the same or even lose performance since the 5800x3d will have lower clocks.
So if you will look at a review that will only show games that use huge amounts of cache the 58003dx will look super awesome, if you look at some other review that will only show games that don't use much cache it will look super crappy.

 

[gruffi]

How?? 250W TDP is nothing for overclockers. FYI, overclocked AMD CPUS can hit just as much, if not more power. highly overclocked 5950x hit 300W easily.

I cannot see the article talked about manual overclocking. 12900KS can draw over 300W at "Recommended Power Limit". An absolute joke of a CPU. 5950X needs less than half of that at stock.


Completely useless CPU with very bad value. Too expensive for gamers, too inefficient for all others. No one with a clear mind would consider to buy it. Especially because there will be much better options in the second half of the year.

 

[TerryLaze]

I cannot see the article talked about manual overclocking. 12900KS can draw over 300W at "Recommended Power Limit". An absolute joke of a CPU. 5950X needs less than half of that at stock.

No it can't draw that much with recommended power limit, even when running prime 95 which uses much more power than anything else.
Even with the limits lifted it only barely touches 300W and immediately drops down to a lower level.