Intel Core i9-12900KF Desktop Processor 16 (8P+8E) Cores up to 5.2 GHz Unlocked  LGA1700 600 Series Chipset 125W

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For all its speed, the Core i9 12900K is also the most power-hungry of the Alder Lake lot, and, well, most desktop CPUs to date. Despite Intel's best efforts with the Intel 7 process node and the Efficient Cores, this chip is still quite thirsty at 241W Maximum Turbo Power (MTP). We've experienced that single-core performance is essential for some games, as many don't take full advantage of multiple cores. Today, we’ll be comparing Intel’s flagship processor the Core i9-14900K against the older Core i9-12900KF and the previous gen, the Core i9-13900K.

At some point we thought a similar thing with Horizon Zero Dawn, perhaps the 3090 Ti just wasn't capable of pushing past 200 fps, but Zen 4 proved that theory wrong reaching just over 210 fps. The 7900X matched other Zen 4 CPUs, so while impressive it was no faster than the 6-core model. Professional tools are often well optimized to use many cores. CPU cores allow tools to parallelize processing tasks. Increasing the number of cores can divide the time required to process a task if the tool has good multi-threading support.This game can be useful for testing low-end CPUs, but for the 7950X it just shows us that we're able to max out the RTX 3090 Ti, matching other high-end CPUs. That's eight Efficient Cores clustered into two groups of four, each group with access to 2MB of L2 cache. These then share access to that same 30MB of Intel Smart Cache that the P-Cores are also privy to. The 7900X also stood up strong in the Adobe Photoshop benchmark despite coming in behind the 7700X and 7950X. A score of 1488 pts meant it was a whisker faster than the 12900K and 21% faster than its predecessor, the 5900X.

Ultimately, though, it's your OS that makes these decisions, and that's why Thread Director works best with Windows 11, which Intel worked with Microsoft on to get just right for Alder Lake.

The more cores a CPU has, the more applications you can run simultaneously without noticing a performance impact. These Efficient Cores serve a couple of functions with Alder Lake. For starters, they help increase the multi-threaded performance, as you've simply got more cores to throw at a problem. Then, there's the ability to remove load from the P-Cores in a pinch, which is really where these low-power cores come in handy for gaming. From a gamer's point of view, the Core i9 12900K can deliver the performance to game, stream, capture, and more, all at once. Though it must be said that cheaper chips such as the Core i5 12600K would appear the more sensible buy if you're primarily gaming, since even the Core i5 makes mincemeat of the 11th Gen Core i9 for PC gamers, and will only hinder your graphics card at 4K and beyond as much as most other modern processors.

Intel's Core i9-12900KF CPUs have 8 Performance cores (P-cores) and 8 Efficiency cores (E-cores) for a total of 16 cores.Office and web applications are typically single-threaded, so running a single application won't take advantage of a many-core CPU.