The 7900X did fall behind the 12900K in the After Effects benchmark, though the margin was slim. A negligible difference there, but not so much when compared to the 5900X as we see a 31% uplift, for an impressive generational improvement.

If you're only planning to stream shows, use office apps, or browse the internet, you won't need a top-end CPU to get good performance. The most important CPU capability for general app usage is the single-core max turbo boost frequency. Alder Lake's P-Cores are more closely related to the CPU cores of previous Intel desktop generations. Take the Core i9 10900K, for example, which has eight CPU cores in total. Consider the 12900K's eight P-Cores in much the same way, although considerably faster.

Execution Units

Office and web applications are typically single-threaded, so running a single application won't take advantage of a many-core CPU. F" means it requires discrete graphics. In other words, it doesn't have integrated graphics (basically a GPU built into the processor), thus requiring a standalone graphics card. This article compares Intel's Core i9-12900K and Core i9-12900KF desktop CPUs. We evaluated Intel's Core i9-12900K and Core i9-12900KF desktop CPUs to determine which would be better for various use cases. We shaped our testing methodology to focus on each CPU's attributes rather than relying solely on benchmarks. There are also still some finer points to work out with Alder Lake as I write this, though it's been less hit-or-miss in testing than I had expected it to be at times during its development and unveiling. Ultimately, though, it feels like Intel has made forward progress with Alder Lake, and that can only be a good thing for our gaming PCs. More competition begets more aggressive prices, more competitive feature sets, and faster adoption of up-to-date standards.

This means under heavy load they'll sit at TJMax which is about 95 degrees Celsius for the Ryzen 7000 series, and this will be particularly true for the 12 and 16-core models.

Use Conditions

For starters, there's PCIe 4.0 support baked right into the Z690 chipset, up to 12 lanes of it. That accompanies the 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 direct from the CPU, which means you shouldn't end up short of available bandwidth for your GPU and a handful of speedy SSDs. The availability of plenty of bandwidth also ensures there's the potential for plenty of USB ports, although that will depend on your board choice. Then for those interested in productivity, it's almost always going to be the case where buying the 7950X ends up being the better deal. When just factoring in motherboard and memory costs, it's not much more for an additional 33% cores, and those extra cores often net you a good amount of performance.

As we've seen in the previous Zen 4 coverage, Rainbow Six Extraction isn't a great title for AMD's latest, but it's not a bad one either as the 7900X trailed the 12900K by just 4%. Increased core counts can improve the performance of games that use them, but most modern games don't benefit from having more than 6–8 cores. We've experienced the best performance by prioritizing a higher single-core boost frequency, then on a higher multi-core boost frequency, rather than focusing on core count alone. Remember that cache sizes often increase along with core counts, so if you want to increase your L3 cache, you may need to get a CPU with more cores. When compared to the 5900X, the 7900X was 24% faster in this test but also pushed system consumption 47% higher, meaning it's much worse when it comes to performance per watt. That said, it was faster than both the 12700K and 12900K, quite a bit faster, and used a bit less power than the 12900K, so at least relative to Intel it's a win for AMD. Cooling Performance Pricing is what largely decides our opinion of these impressive processors, and rumours had initially foretold of a much closer pricing battle between Intel's 12th Gen and AMD's Ryzen 5000-series. Intel's pricing wasn't quite as sky-high as expected, though, and we're left with a situation where Intel's 12th Gen could put a lot of pressure on AMD's Ryzen 5000-series. Cyberpunk 2077 isn't great for AMD CPUs in general and the new Zen 4 CPUs trail Intel's entire Alder Lake K-SKU series, too. The 7900X was a lot slower than the 12900K, trailing by a significant 14% margin which was really disappointing to see, but not unexpected given what we'd already seen from the 7600X, 7700X and 7950X.CONCLUSION : Intel have adequate number of cores most program (including serious games) can use at max but AMD has so many cores that a program rarely or doesn't use all of the cores ( unless you are doing 3D rendering and blending stuff which would benefit from more cores ) and we know that Intel has far better cores than AMD , so for me the Winner is Intel . FINALLY IF YOU'RE READY TO SPEND SOME MONEY ON A GREAT COOLING SYSTEM FOR YOUR PC THEN THIS CPU IS A BIG YES FOR ME ! All BIOS settings were at default, with XMP profiles enabled. Graphics resolution set to 1920×1080 (HD 1080p) or default where ever possible. High or Ultra settings enabled. Based on our evaluation of using Intel's Core i9-12900KF CPU for general apps, you can expect excellent app performance with a high-performance CPU cooler. The 7900X was also dominant in Blender, trailing the 7950X by just 18%, making it 16% faster than the 5950X and a whopping 30% faster than the 12900K. AMD went on to say that 95C is not running hot, rather Zen 4 will intentionally go to this temperature when under load because the power management system knows that this is the ideal way to squeeze the most performance out of the chip without damaging it.

We found that, in general, more cores do provide better performance in professional tools and when running multiple applications simultaneously. Intel classifications are for general, educational and planning purposes only and consist of Export Control Classification Numbers (ECCN) and Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) numbers. Any use made of Intel classifications are without recourse to Intel and shall not be construed as a representation or warranty regarding the proper ECCN or HTS. Your company as an importer and/or exporter is responsible for determining the correct classification of your transaction.As seen previously, the Spider-Man Remastered results for Zen 4 aren't too impressive with the 12700K and 12900K enjoying commanding leads and the 7900X does nothing to change that, matching the 7950X with 114 fps on average, making it 13% slower than the 12900K. Then we've got the Intel 10th-gen core series including popular Core i5, i7 and i9 models, but we decided to skip the 11th generation as it wasn't as relevant and due to time constraints. Of course, the 12th-gen Core processors are part of the comparison and we've tested them using DDR4-3200 dual-rank CL14 memory and DDR5-6400 single-rank CL32 memory, with various models that go from the Core i3-12100 up to the Core i9-12900K.