Intel i9-12900K Ties AMD Ryzen 9 5950X in World-Record Cinebench R20 Run

As fate would have it, Intel's new Alder Lake Core i9-12900K has exactly tied AMD's own Ryzen 9 5950X in a world-record Cinebench run at 15,664 points. As shared on Facebook, Splave, the overall #1 overclocker in the world, posted the world record today, with his Core i9-12900K scoring the highest score we've seen in Cinebench R20 from Intel's new Alder Lake architecture to date.

The world record is a tie with Splave's own world-record Ryzen 9 5950X Cinebench R20 score of 15664, made nearly a year ago. That record still holds as the highest-scoring AMD Ryzen 5000 series CPU to date.

The fact that both CPUs managed to tie each other is quite surprising. In fact, we believe it's unprecedented for two chips to achieve an exact tie in a world record for this benchmark. The chances of this happening are incredibly slim, especially given the fact that Intel's 12900K runs on a completely different architecture compared to the Ryzen 5000 series with a hybrid core layout with a mixture of big cores and small cores. In contrast, the 5950X only has big cores. On top of this, the 12900K is also running DDR5 instead of DDR4 memory, which differentiates the two platforms even further.

The amazing world record was accomplished, as always, with liquid nitrogen cooling on both platforms. The Core i9-12900K operated at 6.9GHz on its main P-cores at a core voltage of 1.58v. The small efficiency cores were also overclocked, but at a substantially lower 5.4GHz, though at nearly the same voltage of 1.57V.

Memory used on the Intel system was 16GB of TeamGroup DDR5, operating at 6565MHz with rather tight timings of CL30-37-37-57 on an AsRock Z690 Aqua OC motherboard.

As for the Ryzen platform, that world-record run was achieved with a Ryzen 9 5950X overclocked to a flat 6GHz on all 16 cores (at an unknown voltage). Memory used was 16GB of G.Skill DDR4 running at 4000MHz with super tight CL14-14-14-48 timings, all installed into an Asrock X570 Aqua motherboard.

We're sure it won't be long until someone breaks the tie by at least one point (probably Splave himself), but it is still spectacular that Intel's new best-of-the-best Alder Lake CPU could only just manage a tie with AMD's much older (but still current) Zen 3 flagship. The Intel vs AMD battle rages ever on.