Intel’s new Alder Lake-S family of desktop processors launched earlier this month and won plenty of praise for outstanding gaming and productivity performance. The current middle child in the Alder Lake-S family, the Core i7-12700K, has earned its place as one of the best CPUs for gaming, and there are deals to be found on the processor for Cyber Monday.
The Core i7-12700K is usually priced around the $450 mark but is currently marked down to $418 at retailers like Newegg and Amazon. At that price, the Core i7-12700K smokes its closest competitor from AMD, the Ryzen 7 5800X. Not only did the Alder Lake chip outpace the Ryzen 7 5800X in 1080p gaming performance, but it also edged ahead of the 12-core/24-thread Ryzen 9 5900X that retails for ~$520. What’s even better is that you don’t even have to use pricey DDR5 memory to achieve stellar performance; legacy DDR4 memory works just fine as well.
In heavily multi-threaded tests — previously a strong point for Zen architecture — the Core i7-12700K blew past its Ryzen 7 5800X rival with 40 percent greater performance. In fact, the Core i7-12700K’s price-to-performance ratio is so compelling that many people may wonder if it’s even worth it to pay extra for the flagship Core i9-12900K. If it were us, we’d save the nearly $200 and go with the Core i7-12700K.
The Core i7-12700K uses Intel’s new hybrid CPU architecture based on the Intel 7 process node. The processor features eight Golden Cove Performance (P) cores and four Gracemont Efficiency (E) cores. Put them together, and you have a total of 12 physical cores capable of executing 20 threads (the Gracemont cores don’t have Hyper-Threading enabled).
Regarding other important specs, the Core i7-12700K P cores have a 3.6 GHz base clock and a maximum turbo frequency of 5.0 GHz (TVB). The E cores chime in at 2.7 GHz and 3.8 GHz, respectively. The processor has a TDP of 125 watts and supports up to DDR4-3200 or DDR5-4800 memory. Another nicety afforded by accompanying Z690 motherboards is support for the PCIe 5.0 interface.
