Intel Alder Lake Benchmarked With DDR4 Memory

Intel Alder Lake chips, which will soon vie for a spot on our list of Best CPUs for gaming, will be the first CPUs to support DDR5 memory, meaning the new Z690 motherboards will have to follow suit. There's been plenty of speculation about which of the new chipsets would also support DDR4, and these new benchmarks may provide some of the answers — the tests showcase an Intel Core i7-12700K CPU paired with DDR4 memory on a Z690 motherboard -- and it did surprisingly well.

Chip detective @TUM_APISAK spotted the benchmarks on PugetBench, but they appear to have been taken down since. The Windows 11 Pro-based system in question consisted of Intel's 12th Gen Core i7-12700K processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card, and 128GB of 3200MHz DDR4 RAM. In addition, the Gigabyte motherboard came with the Z690 chipset.

Intel's new CPU was put to the test in three separate benchmarks. The tests returned scores that put the new Core i7-12700K in a good light, both when compared against Intel's 11th-Gen CPUs and AMD's Ryzen 9. 

Benchmarked with Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Photoshop, the system scored 1565, 1114, and 1244 respectively. Of course, it's hard to tell how good these numbers are without comparing them to other CPUs, but other benchmarks on PugetSystems indicate that Alder Lake would top the charts in every test.

For comparison, AMD Ryzen 9 5950X scored 981 in the Adobe Premiere Pro benchmark, compared to Core i7-12700K scoring 1114. Alder Lake is still victorious in the other two tests, but just barely.

It's important to note that these benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt until the official release of the new processors. Test results may also vary based on the other components used in the system in question. All that aside, the results suggest that Alder Lake will probably hold up well even when paired with DDR4 memory. Considering that the availability of DDR5 RAM is likely going to be limited (and expensive) to begin with, many may end up sticking with DDR4 for the foreseeable future.

As the rumored launch date of Intel Alder Lake looms closer, retailers are slowly starting to list the new Intel 600 series motherboards. Just recently, we've seen PC Canada list nine Asus Z690 models. Not all of them offer DDR5 memory support, and although we haven't seen Gigabyte's full lineup just yet, it's likely that the manufacturer will also offer a mix of DDR4 and DDR5 boards. 

Considering that Intel's 12th-Gen Alder Lake is right around the corner, we should start seeing more Z690 motherboards on the market soon enough, and DDR5 RAM listings are likely to follow.