intel's new alder lake cpu's are here and in this video i'm testing the 12700 kf which is the i7
chip and i'm testing that against my 5900x to see is this now the new king are the alder lake parts
the recommended cpus for star citizen we've got windows 10 we've got windows 11 we've got hyper
threading we've got e cores off we've turned it into an i5 to see what it performs like and we've
also got some vbs testing all very interesting let's get into it let's talk test setup and as
i do some of the results come up on the screen from the windows 10 testing about it so both
systems have got a 3080 in them they've got exactly the same around 32 gigs of ram cl 16
and they've also got the exact same nvme drive model so in theory the systems are as close as
they can get to both on windows 10 as you see and you look at the results you'll see
the 12 700 kf is beating the 5900x pretty handily in most of these tests on windows 10. and there's
one interesting thing you might have noticed is that the 1 lows are significantly lower in some
areas so there is definitely something going on there and as we get into the more uh extravagant
and longer testing that i did that will come clear but on first glance you have to say it looks great
and i have to say i was surprised i thought this would slightly beat up the 5900x but actually
in some areas it really boots it quite handily and yeah as you'll see as we'll get into it more it's
a bit more fine-tuned a bit more nuanced than that but anyway let's get into some more laurel
testing so now here's where things start to get really interesting we're going to lauraville this
is where i've done the majority of the testing i've done 20 runs for everything you see here
average dial pretty accurate results so first of all there we go 5900 x versus the 12 700 kf
and a significant win for the a the intel chip so it's looking good but the story continues
so the next thing to do was to turn the e cores off of the intel chip so these new intel chips
come with these corset efficiency cores which are lower power cores that don't clock as high that
basically are designed to run things in the background whilst your main thing is running
so inferior things like streaming or maybe video editing things going on in the background whilst
you are playing game for instance but windows 10 doesn't really support them there the scheduler
for them doesn't work it's only really a windows 11 feature and so when you then turn them off of
the windows 10 runs here you'll see a big increase in frames overall but actually if you look at the
one percent lows they have jumped right up and stability then all the stability issues that
we're finding with the results before where the one set loads were really low and it's a bit laggy
they have been fixed effectively by turning off the e-cores so that is very interesting the next
thing to then do is to look at windows 11. so if we look at windows 11 versus windows 10 just stock
with all the equals everything on you'll see that actually the performance has gone down overall but
the one percent loads have gone up and again the the general experience was just much smoother here
on windows 11 windows 11 knows what to do with the e cores and it doesn't really get in the way
of good performance however windows 11 is down on windows 10. so that's interesting i then did
another 20 runs with the e cores off in windows 11 and again performance is slightly better this
time than just the stock results for windows 11 but nowhere near the increase that we saw with
windows 10 but interesting enough and you have to make that decision if you buy one of these chips
whether you want to keep the equals on or off there are reasons to keep them on but maybe for
pure gaming you might want to turn them off next up some hyper-threading testing in the
past i found with the 5900x at least that it performs better when you turn off simultaneous
multi-threading or hypertonic same thing and actually the case here is that that isn't any
there's no there's no good benefit to turning off hyper-threading with this intel chip i also
had a quick go with turning this into the i5 model so turning off to the performance cores
and it effectively becomes the same thing it won't clock the same and the cache will be different and
it looks as though actually turning the pea cores off reduce the amount of cash available i have to
look at that a bit more but a few fps less i don't know if that would be reflected by using an actual
i5 but that might be something somebody else will test or maybe i'll get around to it one day
and finally for my loyal testing i was really flagging by the time i did this
but the vbs testing so virtual based security this is a feature that has been available on windows
10 but actually is default on in windows 11 if you're building a new system and it does have a
fairly sizable hit to performance so there are good reasons to have it on it's extra security
depending on the sort of work you're doing whatever but for gaming it looks or at least
for star citizen it looks as though there is a bit of a performance hit by having it enabled
so what to make for that well there's a lot there's a lot to go through
effectively the first thing to say is that the older lake cpus have to now be the recommended
cpu if you're buying a new system for star citizen they are significantly faster than the current
5000 ryzen chips which were already very quick uh star citizen wise uh but
again verizon will respond uh md will respond with some uh fancy cash stuff that they're doing
that will come at some point next year and again that might come back up but actually these intel
chips are probably faster than i was expecting so i don't know whether they'll meet them but anyway
the recommendation probably new system by intel this series they're really great for star citizen
if you want the best performance that's where to go but realistically if you're already on
ryzen say you're on a ryzen 2000 or 3000 cpu the amount of money that costs to just move everything
across to a new motherboard and everything you'd be better off probably just upgrading to the 5000
series unless you need absolute best performance so that's that then it gets a bit more complicated
so windows 10 is a mixed bag because as i've said the windows 10 just flat the processors
are left as it is with everything on the equals on performs well beats the 5900 x but it also
is a bit of a stuttering mess the one we said lows are not good and it just windows basically
doesn't know what to do with the equals windows 10 doesn't know what to do with the e course and it
just doesn't really work that well so windows 10 you take the e-course off and you then get great
performance but whether that's practical for most people to turn the e-cords off whether you've got
other reasons why you might want them on i think really if you're going to go for this cpu you're
probably going to have to move to windows 11 because although we saw the results weren't as
good as the windows 10 results they are generally more stable and potentially crg will be working on
on that as time goes on um hyper threading made no real difference vbs is worth talking about because
vbs you want to turn off and then really if you're looking and talking about the actual line
from the i9 i7 i5 they're probably going to perform pretty similarly but in the testing we did
the i5 maybe will perform slightly worse but we're talking a couple of fps i'm sure again it will
beat out the ryzen chips so that could be a good choice as well as i was editing this i realized
i hadn't mentioned ddr4 versus ddr5 at all and in an ideal world i'd actually ordered a motherboard
for ddr5 and i'd ordered some ddr5 ram and the plan was to include that in this video as well
but there's just none in stock so i couldn't get hold of any ddr5 ram but that will be something to
look at in the future and that will be something that's coming up i guess as well my personal
opinion on this i was expecting just to sell this system back up sell it on or do something with
it i wasn't expected to keep it i thought well it's not really much better than my 5900x system
but it the performance of points was it felt like a real game i know that's ridiculous to
say but i think this shows that actually we're always waiting for a tech from crg to improve
performance so we're always talking about gen 12 vulcan or whatever but what this shows is that
probably by the time the game is actually out the hardware that we're able to purchase will probably
be fast enough to run the game anywhere and i don't know whether that's been crg's plan along
is for development to be so long that eventually the hardware catches up with their ideas but
yeah there was points where i was playing this and and i was not dropping below 40 fps which is not
something i've ever really seen in the cities before uh and it and yeah it felt like a real
game and performance felt really really good so
i was a bit blown away so i was not expecting it to be that much better than the 5900x but
yeah i'm probably going to keep this system now and and convert it across and use this as my main
system that's probably enough for this one but if you like this sort of stuff this technical look at
statism please subscribe and like this video that helps out a lot as well and you can now even join
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