Alder Lake CPU benchmarks, Intel Core i9-12900K vs AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

Synthetic & gaming benchmarks for Intel Core i9-12900K leak

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Intel Core i9-12900K benchmarks have leaked! Featuring both synthetic and gaming benchmarks.

This leak is the latest from Enthusiast Citizen, a member of Bilibili, who has supposedly had their hands on an Intel Core i9-12900K for a while now.

Enthusiast Citizen ran their tests on what appears to be an ASRock Z690 Steel Legend motherboard with an AMD Radeon RX 6600 GPU; a blurred image of the setup can be seen below. Read further down the page for a list of the details of how the Intel Core i9-12900K performs.

Intel Core i9-12900K specifications

The specifications of the Alder Lake flagship CPU are understood to be as follows:

Cores/threads: 16/24
P-cores: 8
E-cores: 8
P-core clock speed base/boost: 3.2 GHz / 5.3 GHz
E-core clock speed base/boost: 3.0 / 3.9 GHz
L3 cache: 30 MB
L2 cache: 12.5 MB

Intel Core i9-12900K benchmarks (synthetic)

First, we got to look at some synthetic benchmarks using 3DMark Time Spy. As you can see below, the Intel Core i9-12900K got a CPU score of 17,915, which compares very favorably to the 14,026 of the 10th gen Intel Core i9-10900K, the previous leader of the pack, and the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X at 13,780.

Intel Core i9-12900K benchmarks (gaming)

Of course, synthetic CPU scores don’t neccessarily translate into FPS performance, given that the way the CPU cores interact with each other and the broader architecture is as important as single-core power. Fortunately Enthusiast Citizen was also kind enough to run some gaming benchmarks, specifically for Forza Horizon 4, Rainbow Six Siege, and Shadow of The Tomb Raider, all of which you can see below.

Intel Core i9-12900K Forza Horizon 4 benchmark

Forza Horizon 4 is the only gaming benchmark of the bunch which shows the Intel Core i9-12900K performance compared to another CPU, specifically the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. As you can see, the tests were both done at 1080p, with the Intel Core i9-12900K running on a Windows 11 machine and the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X on Windows 10 (to avoid the L3 cache performance drop that is currently being experienced by Ryzen CPUs, hopefully soon to be resolved). The Intel Core i9-12900K edged ahead in this game, with an average FPS score of 193 FPS, compared to the 189 FPS of the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X setup.

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Intel Core i9-12900K Rainbow Six Siege benchmark

Although we didn’t get any comparison results in this one, the Intel Core i9-12900K got a 252 FPS on average in R6: Siege at 1080p, which is a respectable score when paired with an AMD Radeon RX 6600 GPU.

Intel Core i9-12900K Shadow Of The Tomb Raider benchmark

Once again there were no comparison results to put against the Intel Core i9-12900K in Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, but the 112 FPS is certainly a decent average read-out when paired with an AMD Radeon RX 6600 graphics card.