Alder Lake's P-Cores are more closely related to the CPU cores of previous Intel desktop generations. Take the Core i9 10900K, for example, which has eight CPU cores in total. Consider the 12900K's eight P-Cores in much the same way, although considerably faster. Pricing is what largely decides our opinion of these impressive processors, and rumours had initially foretold of a much closer pricing battle between Intel's 12th Gen and AMD's Ryzen 5000-series. Intel's pricing wasn't quite as sky-high as expected, though, and we're left with a situation where Intel's 12th Gen could put a lot of pressure on AMD's Ryzen 5000-series. Pair its excellent single-threaded performance with the new wave of E-Cores and you're onto a winner in multi-threaded performance, too. To my surprise, the Core i9 12900K manages to outmuscle the Ryzen 9 5950X, a straight 16-core chip, in Cinebench R23. In Time Spy's CPU tests, it runs away with it. In all honesty, I wasn't expecting the blend of P-Cores and E-Cores to do this in such a way.

Zen 4 has impressed in Hitman 3. The 7900X matches other 7000 series processors already tested with 229 fps on average, which means it delivers 12900K-like performance. Office and web applications are typically single-threaded, so running a single application won't take advantage of a many-core CPU. Based on our evaluation, the 12900KF's 5.20 GHz single-core max turbo boost frequency is excellent for performance with the latest graphics-intense games. You can maintain these frequencies with a high-end cooler. Based on our evaluation of using Intel's Core i9-12900KF CPU for gaming, you can expect excellent game performance with a high-performance CPU cooler.As I've said before, Alder Lake isn't an iterative update to an already long-standing architecture. For that, it appears some creases weren't ironed out ahead of launch, and one is the occasional incompatible game, as Intel stated ahead of time in regards to DRM solution, Denuvo.

The Ryzen 9 7900X is an impressive and capable CPU, but in a way it's also a somewhat unfortunate product, because while it's quite good at everything, in terms of value it's not great, even for a specific workload.To maximize performance with professional tools, you'll want to use a CPU with a high turbo boost frequency and many CPU cores. Good heat dissipation is needed to maintain turbo boost frequencies for extended periods. We took these factors into account while assessing the expected CPU performance for professional tools.

When it comes to productivity, the 7900X looks far more impressive from a value standpoint. It's not quite as good as the 7950X based on our Cinebench scores, but even so it's comparable to the Core i9-12900K.Intel's been talking a big game when it comes to Intel Alder Lake performance, and after getting my hands on the Core i9 12900K, I can't say I'm surprised, either. This chip does reclaim the gaming performance crown in almost every game we tested, and often by a large margin. It appears as though we've reached the limits of the RTX 3090 Ti in Shadow of the Tomb Raider using the highest quality preset at 1080p with all high-end CPUs hitting a wall at around 190 fps. As a result the 7900X is only on par with the 12900K. Faster PC memory can improve game and professional tool performance by reducing the time it takes to perform calculations and data operations. The first thing we did was update the BIOS on the Unify motherboard to the latest available version. Since this article is more about testing the CPU performance, we primarily tested in Cinebench and AIDA 64, rather than any PC game benchmarks that are more focused on GPU performance.