Intel 12th Gen Core i5-12600K, i7-12700K & i9-12900K CPU Review

Z690 Motherboards and Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake Pricing

Here’s a round-up of all the motherboards and processors I’ve reviewed today. This includes up to date pricing that was correct prior to launch. However, I expect prices and stock to be a little more volatile after the launch, so please keep in mind that they are subject to change. Most of the prices and links are from Amazon UK, however, I have included some prices and links to Scan.co.uk for items that were not available on Amazon at the time of writing.

• Intel 12th Gen Core i5-12600K, i7-12700K & i9-12900K CPU (review) – £290 @ Scan / £419 @ Scan / £599 @ Scan
• ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 EXTREME Motherboard (review) – £935 @ Scan / £1669 Glacial Edition
• ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 HERO Motherboard (review) – £520 @ Scan
• ASUS TUF Gaming Z690-Plus WiFi D4 Motherboard (review) – £280 @ Scan
• ASUS ROG Z690-I Gaming WiFi Motherboard (review) – £375 @ Scan
• Gigabyte Z690 AORUS XTREME Motherboard (review) – £767
• Gigabyte Z690 AORUS Master Motherboard (review) – £416
• Gigabyte Z690 AORUS Pro Motherboard (review) – £290
• MSI MPG Z690 Carbon WiFi Motherboard (review) – £410 @ Scan
• MSI MAG Z690 TOMAHAWK WIFI DDR4 Motherboard (review) – £301
• MSI MEG Z690 UNIFY Motherboard (review) – £510 @ Scan

Overview

It’s clear that Intel is back on top once again, albeit with a few predictable consequences. The Intel Core i9-12900K is extremely fast, thrashing everything that’s come before it and it’ll likely stay on top for some time. When it comes to gaming, it made light work of everything we ran, setting new high scores with ease. That’s hardly surprising though, given the new big.LITTLE core design, higher clock speeds, and leveraging the new technologies of the Z690 motherboards. This is the next-gen upgrade we’ve been waiting for from Intel.

Z690 Performance

We used the Intel Core i9-12900K in all our Z690 motherboard reviews. As we might have expected, pretty much all of the Z690 motherboards performed around about the same, so if all you care about is straight-up gaming performance, then just pick the one you like and go nuts. If they can max out the i9-12900K, the Core i5-12600K and the Core i7-12700K should be a breeze. Of course, those wanting to sit at max boost all day for heavy workloads should look towards models with a more robust VRM and cooling in general.

The new CPUs come with the latest Intel WiFi 6E built-in too, so all the motherboards we reviewed did indeed have WiFi, which is pretty fantastic.

DDR5

It’s clear that DDR5 is a huge advantage in our memory performance tests and rendering tasks. All that extra bandwidth just provides a brute force advantage, even if memory timings and latencies aren’t as good as what we’re used to on DDR4, however, that will certainly mature as DDR5 is fresh to market. Furthermore, I fully expect we’ll see some BIOS updates, further Windows 10/11 updates and more that will see all the new Intel CPUs, Z690 and DDR5 have their performance fine-tuned over the coming weeks and months.

PCIe 4.0 and 5.0

While the performance of the AMD chips is great, Intel is now stepping up to match AMD with PCIe 4.0 M.2 storage, so Intel fans can now have 7000 Mbps+ read and write speeds, which is awesome. So they’re an even match there now. However, Intel are the first to adopt PCIe 5.0, and while there are no supporting GPUs or storage devices, I suspect the new Intel GPUs will be the first products to market for this, and perhaps new storage devices after CES 2022.

Power

There’s no doubting that the new CPUs are powerful, all three of them did great. It’s clear the bit.LITTLE is having an impact on things like temperatures too. At idle, all three sat around 26-28c, which is much cooler than anything else we tested, likely because the P-core are shut off. However, when gaming, the P-Cores are working and the 12900K reached 82C. However, under intense rendering workloads in R23, they reached 101C, because all cores were maxed out. That’s pretty hot, but that’s within the operating range, and the performance we got was exceptional. Of course, the 12600K only hit 64C gaming and 68C rendering, with the 12700K doing 72C gaming and 84C rendering. They’re certainly a lot easier to keep cool then!

Power consumption was up, but I mean… duh, of course it was. There are more cores, these cores are running faster than the old model, and even the die is larger. They’re just taking more power and turning it into more performance. However, it seems like AMD is still more efficient, but that’s expected given AMDs 7nm vs Intels 10nm process. However, Intel has gone for “more is more” approach, and power and heat aside, it seems to be working.

Should I Buy One?

They’re all fantastic, and I think most will be happy with the 12600K or even the 12700K if you need a little more punch. The prices of both are certainly more competitive than I expected. However, the 12900K is just such a brutal weapon that I can’t help but love what it has to offer. Of course, you’ll want a really solid CPU cooler if you plan to max it out all day, but any decent air cooler is fine for a more gaming focused setup.

This is clearly just the beginning though, with the new motherboards, chipset, and CPUs bringing PCIe 5.0, DDR5, Gen 4 M.2 and so much, the performance lift in your new build will benefit from more than just the new CPU cores, as it’s time to overall the whole thing!