Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
For our testing we used the be quiet! Pure Loop 2 FX 360mm liquid cooler which is fully compatible with AM5. After an hour of looping Cinebench multi-core with the Pure Loop 2 FX installed inside the be quiet! Silent Base 802, we recorded a peak CPU temperature of 97C for the primary CCD and 94C for the secondary CCD, so just above the 95c TJMax. Cost vs. Performance Time for the value analysis and as we found with the 7950X, the 7900X is overkill for gamers and largely a waste of money if all you plan on doing is gaming. We'll be testing more Denuvo-protected titles in the coming weeks to get a more complete picture of how widespread the issue may be on both Windows 10 and Windows 11, but until then we would advise gamers to use this list to look for (possibly) unlaunchable titles. The sheer boldness of that statement may not have caught everyone on the first pass, so let's reiterate: Intel's latest gaming processor, marketed by the company as the "World's Best Gaming Processor," may not play certain games. It's dependent on the digital rights management (DRM) system used by the game to protect its licenses. As I said before in our previous comparison, Intel’s 14th Gen Core processors (Raptor Lake-S) isn’t really a “Next-Gen” but rather a “Refresh” of their previous 13th Gen Raptor Lake processors.
We ran the Photoshop and Premiere Pro versions of these benchmarks, which showed some impressive results that shouldn't be shoved aside as mere marketing hoopla. (More on that in a minute.) New Day, New Power Definitions
Log in
All models support up to DDR5-5600 or DDR4-3200 memory, and 16 lanes of PCI Express 5.0 + 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0. I haven’t tried the so-called 6GHz boost “right out of the box”… I shouldn’t need to! When I buy a product, it expect it to run at the default speed and that should be good enough. However, my motherboard allows safe AUTO Turbo Boost to 5.5GHz and 5.8GHz, which is just fine by me. By Turbo Boosting to 6GHz, you better make sure you have sufficient cooling that can handle those high temperatures.
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. Here we can see that the effect of Windows 11 and Thread Director on the Intel Core i9-12900K's benchmark results. In some cases it was within the margin of error, but it did also correct for the issues we saw in HandBrake and POV-Ray during the Windows 10 test set. Moving to Windows 11 also adds a not-insignificant boost to the Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere test runs (using the Puget Systems PugetBench test utilities), which showcases usage scenarios more along the lines of what Intel says Thread Director was made to handle. Note: All of these test runs above were performed on their respective AMD and Intel testbeds under Windows 10.) The issue with games like Assassin's Creed: Valhalla arises either on launch or on load, because Denuvo thinks that the P-cores and E-cores belong to two separate systems, rather than two different core types on the same chip. Once it detects that some portion of the load has been split between the P and E cores, it sees the new cores as a new license holder (a separate system), and force-quits the game to prevent what it believes is two PCs trying to play one game on the same key. 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.Overall, there's little contest to be shown here; overwhelmingly, the Intel Core i9-12900K, with its 16 available cores and 24 available threads, was able to beat out the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X's 32 threads in almost every content-creation task we threw its way. And that's without Thread Director in play. Gamers are certainly better off going with the Ryzen 7 7700X as it's essentially as fast (or even slightly faster) and is much cheaper. Even when factoring in the platform costs, the 8-core model is considerably better value for gaming. Finally, to close out our testing (we always leave the stress runs for last in case of disaster), our attempts to push the Intel Core i9-12900K to its thermal limits in a 10-minute run through Cinebench 23 in CoreTemp, we found the CPU posted a maximum temperature of 73 degrees C in our testing on a new Corsair iCue 360mm closed-loop liquid cooler. These results were achieved using the be quiet! Pure Loop 2 FX 360mm liquid cooler installed inside the be quiet! Silent Base 802.
My Ryzen 5950X result was almost identical to the one I got with the same chip inside the Origin Neuron. That said, the average result from the 3D Mark leaderboards is slightly higher. This is likely a memory issue; even with XMP enabled, the Ryzen 9 5950X produced subpar results. You’d need to tighten timings to achieve a higher score, which is a problem the Core i9-12900K doesn’t have. One of the nice things about the MSI MEG Z690 Unify motherboard is that the LED that posts diagnostic codes during bootup switches to a CPU temperature monitor after booting, showing you the temperature of your CPU. Thread Director is informed by a new microcontroller on the CPU itself, which will feed Windows 11 more detailed hardware telemetry about the current status of the chip and its cores, versus older releases in Intel's desktop line. Information that was previously left a mystery to Windows—think aspects like thermals, power settings, and which threads can take more instructions—is now communicated to the scheduler in microseconds, leaving almost no impact and (in theory) adding considerable performance gains, depending on the workflow and the various kinds of overhead that can be leveraged. Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. See how we test.The Intel Core i9-12900K's 8 Performance cores have a 3.20 GHz base frequency and support a 5.10 GHz max turbo boost frequency.
Great Deal 
New Comment