alder lake rockets off into space cascading like a comet on coffee at least that's what
it seems like after benching this bucker so let's talk about the 12600k what is probably
the lowest cost mini itx entry point right now and compare against the 5800x and the 5600x
welcome to machines of more by now you've seen some initial benchmarks from the day one reviews
i did go and grab a retail version of the chip so i'm a little bit late to the party but what
i wanted to do with alder lake was to add a little bit of real world color from a small form factor
viewpoint and what i'm gonna do today is show you what i think is the most reasonable way to
get into alder lake for mini itx in an air cooled mini itx system and do a like for like comparison
against what i think is this real competition from a total platform cost and performance
perspective and then i'll share some of my thoughts on whether or not you should go for
the 12600k if you haven't seen dave2d's alder lake review i'd recommend checking it out it's a
great review and in an nr200 no less my favorite part of dave's review was where he highlighted
a decision that sff builders are very familiar with yet you can put a 280 in your nr200 or your
meshlicious and yeah with high enough fan speeds you can tame power monster chips like the i9s
during heavy multi-threaded workloads but at the end of the day what is that build going to look
like so from a cost and sff suitability standpoint the 320 12600k is by far the most compelling chip
out of the current alder lake lineup so that's the one i really wanted to test and even though the
12900k is simply going to have more multi-thread performance simply from a core count perspective
that kind of performance comes with enormous power draw and at least speaking personally i really
like the simplicity of a build like this 12600k build here and for gaming it's really not going to
matter all that much and i'm going to have those extra cores for this build i've set up the 12600k
with the gigabyte aorus z690 itx motherboard 290 dollars it's one of the cheapest z690 itx sports
that you can get now although it is pretty early in the game because it is a ddr4 compatible board
with Alder Lake you will have to choose whether or not you want to go with ddr4 ddr5 but if you
want to go down that ddr5 route that becomes very challenging the msi board comes in at about 400
and the asus at 440 not to mention the higher cost for ddr5 ram kits currently so i don't see the
value just yet and i have a hard time recommending that you spend that much on a motherboard
for a 320 dollar chip on top of that ddr5 still has some room to grow it's clocked fast but a
lot of the kits have pretty high latencies right now so it makes a lot of sense at least for now to
stick with a high quality ddr4 kit now and for this test i'm going to be comparing apples to
apples and pairing the same ram kit this is the crucial ballistix 3200 megahertz cl 16 kit
very solid kit you can get for about 70 dollars or 75 or so and it works fine with both ryzen cpus
and this 12600k so the benchmarks will be with the same exact kit so that puts the platform cost for
a ddr4 12600k mini itx setup at 685 or so probably the lowest cost entry point right now into
12th gen for mini itx and to make it fair and real world we'll be pairing all the chips with a Noctua
u12a of course the amd chips get the original and the intel the chromax but they're essentially
the same and both setups are in an nr 200 case dave 2d experienced cooler clearance issues with
his air cooler on his board and i had a similar issue with this board but it was really because
of this ginormous m.2 heatsink which it's just total overkill uh but good news you can take it
off and if you need to i just mount an aftermarket m.2 heatsink if you're intent on running something
like this u12a on this board real quick rundown on specs the 12600k is a 10 core chip featuring
six performance cores and intel's previous gen uh core i5s going all the way back to 8th gen coffee
lake we're six core parts these six performance cores offer up to 4.9 gigahertz on a single core
with turbo boost which is really really fast but the big architectural change here is to move to
the big little concept with four efficiency cores that can turbo up to 3.6 gigahertz and at least
conceptually it's similar to what apple has done with its m1 chips and also the new m1 pro and the
m1 max those e cores do sound a little bit wimpy but don't underestimate the work that they can do
3.6 gigahertz not too long ago was a pretty decent boost clock right so it's not exactly correct to
just think of the 12600k as a purely six core chip that being said in a gaming scenarios those
e cores won't help you too much and your current titles they really won't scale too well beyond six
cores or eight cores anyway so for the comparison benchmarks you're gonna see the primary ryzen
comparison i'm going to be talking about is the 5800x it's the closest ryzen equivalent yeah and
i know typically it would go up against intel's eight core chips but think about
from a platform cost perspective and as you'll see from the holistic performance aspect this is
the most direct team red competition and to add some color to this discussion i also re-benched
the 5600x everything is at stock auto settings to keep the comparisons simplistic the benchmarks i'm
presenting are from the latest update of windows 11. now i did have a hiccup i experienced with the
two far cry titles i benched uh i'll explain when we get to that point and um yeah it's a little
complicated but both systems share the same 3080fe graphics card all right let's start with some
synthetic benchmarks 3d mark time spy intel leads the way here passing the 5800 hex by quite a bit
the graphic score isn't very cpu sensitive but at least you know none of these chips will hold back
a 3080 here next up everyone likes cinebench so let's check in on the r23 multi-core score
wow just wow look at this this thing is neck and neck with the 5800x now the e cores are still
cores right now it clearly shows here but look at that single core score it's ridiculous and
i remember when zen 3 first came out we were all marveling at the performance and here elder lake
steps it up to the next level geekbench 5 is not a high stress benchmark but it gives us a good idea
of how a system would function in the real world yeah this chip doesn't play around it's hitting
harder than the 5800x and this single quart is absolutely no joke and just a fun data point here
for reference apple silicon is to talk the town now and yeah this is a mobile chip but hey hey
intel says don't count me out just yet against the 10 core m1 pro with an 8p plus 2e setup it does
trail a little bit but yeah it absolutely mops the floor with it for single core performance for
some real world processes i did a test in davinci resolve 17 exporting a 12 and a half minute long
4k timeline in 1080 h.264 this is an area that ryzen has beat intel at when comparing say ryzen
5 to core i5 and yeah right now intel is playing with house money in blender's pavilion render
finally the 5800x manages to eke out a much needed win but the 12600k is right behind it all right
let's get into the gaming benchmarks the 5800x and 5600x are among the best cpus you can get now for
that purpose so let's take a look at a few tunnels where the cpu performance really really matters
and unfortunately this is the one i had a snag with i started out benching with the 5800x and
then a windows 11 update came out so i said fine and i redid all the benchmarks and windows 11
still being very iffy far cry performance ended up being worse so i do have to present the benchmarks
as is but i will footnote and include the initial 5800x benchmarks because it is much closer to the
performance in windows 10 and this is what i would expect with it far cry 6 oh my goodness
it's gus intel rockets ahead of the zen 3 chips here it does look like the two ryzens had a
little too much zafiro but i am pretty sure once everything gets ironed out with windows 11 that
it'll be much closer but that being said 12600k is absolutely winning here both in 1440p and in 1080.
you can tell that the cpu is a limiting factor here because going down in resolution to 1080
really doesn't get you a meaningfully higher frame rate in this title that's kind of the
same thing with the older far cry 5 and by the way these are all amd optimized titles so intel
is playing in amd's own backyard with this kind of performance continuing on with more cpu intensive
titles watchdogs legion isn't the most optimized title there's not much of a difference between
1080 or 1440. 12 600k is slightly ahead here and with slightly more consistent frame times
let's take a look at some titles where the cpu matters a little bit less and the gpu is
typically more of the limiting factor red dead 2 ryzen has performed quite well here in the past
but i didn't expect this big of a gap with the 12600k in 1080 the difference is quite astonishing
1440p is also quite good with the 12 600k and very good consistency compared to ryzen all right
assassins creed valhalla is very very gpu limited and finally something where the 5800x can at least
somewhat hold serve very small differences here and this was a title where the 5600x beat the 11th
gen 11 600k how about some strategy titles civ 6 yeah even here the 12600k beats out the 5800 x
however come ai turn time the 5800x does finally flex its muscle to round things out a title that
i've been enjoying a lot lately age of empires 4. finally a worthy successor to aoe 2. yeah
i think that pretty much says it all so intel chips have gotten a bad rap in the past for power
use at least lately but let's take a look here at some total system power consumption numbers
out of the nile use the 12 600k actually compares quite favorably and reasonably against the 5800x
and in fact it is drawing lower power at stock settings for the all core cpu render
and not really meaningfully less but you know it's it's not more in gaming that rather reasonable
power usage number actually translates quite well to thermals and here with the fans locked to 1700
rpm we're seeing very manageable thermals and it looks like a u12a is going to have
a little headroom for overclocking too i will note that the x570itx board does give the 5800x quite
a bit of unnecessary voltage at stock settings and that is something that the user typically
needs to fine tune and you can do curve optimizer but realistically for zen 3 temps like what the
5800x is exhibiting here that's supposedly within design but the big takeaway here is that cooling
is not going to be a big issue for the 12600k as for the core clocks during the all core render
here's what things look like the 12600 ksp cores do run at a lower speed uh for a stock all four
turbo in fact it is exceeding what uh the spec was um it's specked at 3.6 but we're getting 3.7 here
uh but yeah those four e cores they're actually quite a decent speed here still okay thank you
amd this is the product of competition and the 12600k totally exceeded my expectations
here and i'm quite impressed i started testing this thing and i really tried to find something
i disliked about it because it was doing so many things while i was like there's got to be
something wrong with it right but there wasn't and something just felt completely different
compared to the recent gen intel chips that i've tested there really really isn't anything
i dislike about this chip but should you get it well i'll have a review coming up where we
focus more on performance with a lighter weight gpu which may be applicable for a lot more of
you but suffice to say if you're running something like a 3080 or radeon 6800 and above level of card
this is a really seriously compelling choice to pair with that card and from the benchmarks that
you saw it either matches or flat out beats the 5800x windows 11 bugs aside right but that being
said if you are strictly gaming i would still steer you towards the 5600x because of that value
aspect the 5600x is still going to be your lowest cost entry point for a high performance gaming
system right now that's 300 plus you could pair it with a cheap b450 itx or b550 itx board so that
comes out to be about 450 470 for the board and cpu and if a lower bend 5600 ever comes
along that value argument might get even more interesting 12 400. notwithstanding of course
but if you are looking for both productivity and gaming performance both the 5800x and the 12600k
are very compelling at this point and given that a 5800x plus the x570 itx board as tested was about
650 and the 12 600k plus z690 board as tested was about 610. now there's even a small value argument
for the 12600k now granted the 5800x would work just fine with the b550itx board too but even
with platform price being equal if you're building a new system right now i'd choose the 12600k in
a heartbeat plus pcie 5.0 compatibility is ready for the future okay things look pretty bright for
intel and amd definitely woke the sleeping bear now there is a category of users that i wouldn't
recommend upgrading at least not just yet and that's if you have an am4 socket board already
and it's not time to change motherboards yet and your cpu is still getting you along
well enough for that i definitely recommend waiting to see how amd's 3d cache refresh
plays out and then well you would still have your pick of a 5800x or just go ahead and do the old
switcheroo with a new board right you'll notice that the intel system was built up in the white
nr200 and the amd and the black and r200 and i wasn't trying to suggest that amd was dark side
uh the intel cpu gets the chromax after all right but is amd dark side or intel dark side yeah i
don't know but to me it looks a little bit like the empire strikes back but also i feel like intel
has been out of contention enough lately to have earned that prized rebel status as well either
way one thing is for sure the force is strong in this one and well done intel this is some serious
silicon here with that i'll wrap up this first look at the toll 600k i'll be doing another round
of comparisons for those of you with more moderate gpus so please go ahead and subscribe if you
haven't already links are down below for the cpus tested and the setup thanks for watching today
you