After an amazingly long wait, Intel has officially announced the 12th Generation Alder Lake processors, the first heterogeneous mainstream parts that support DDR5 and PCIe 5.0. Our resident overclocking guru Allen 'Splave' Golibersuch didn't waste any time in breaking a couple of world records with the new hybrid chips during Intel's livestreamed event.
With the help of a few tanks of liquid nitrogen, Splave pushed the Core i9-12900K to 6.8 GHz on the Golden Cove Performance cores (P-cores), and 5.3 GHz on the Gracemont cores Efficiency cores (E-cores). He also dialed in 5.5 GHz on the ring/cache. For reference, the Core i9-12900K features 5.2 GHz P-core and 3.9 GHz E-core boost clocks. That's a 31% and 36% overclock on the P-and E-cores, respectively.
ASRock's Z690 Aqua OC Edition was Splave's motherboard of choice. The OC Edition is almost a carbon copy of the vanilla Z690 Aqua, except with two fewer DDR5 memory slots. The dual-DIMM design aims to improve memory overclocking. The ASRock Z690 Aqua OC Edition is limited to 500 units. The Core i9-12900K system also included Klevv's DDR5-4800 memory, which was overclocked to DDR5-6200 C34, a Reaktor 2.0 LN2 pot, and EVGA's SuperNOVA 1600W power supply.
Intel Core i9-12900K World Records
| Header Cell - Column 0 | Score | Single-Core | Multi-Core (16-Core) |
|---|---|---|---|
| XTU 2.0 | 12,765 | N/A | N/A |
| Geekbench 4 | N/A | 11,669 | 93,232 |
| Geekbench 5 | N/A | 2,740 | 26,649 |
Splave set the new single-and multi-core (16-core) Geekbench 4 and Geekbench 5 world records with the Core i9-12900K at 6.8 GHz/5.3 GHz. For XTU 2.0, however, he had to drop the Golden Cove cores down to 6.7 GHz to achieve enough stability to finish the benchmark run.
The Core i9-11900K (Rocket Lake) and the Ryzen 9 5950X (Zen 3) were the previous record holders for Geekbench 5 single-and 16-core benchmarks at 2,309 points and 20,929 points, respectively. Therefore, the Core i9-12900K outclassed Intel's own chip by 19% and AMD's chip by 27%.
Alder Lake is available for preorder at the majority of U.S. retailers, however, the chips won't ship out until November 4, 2021. The Core i9-12900K retails for $589, which is only $40 more expensive than the previous Core i9-11900K. However, the flagship Alder Lake processor costs $210 less than AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core monster.
