Intel Core i5 Alder Lake i5-12600K BOX (BX8071512600K)

Simplified Alder Lake die processor

Unlike the new Core i7 and Core i9 chips, the Core i5 processors are based on a smaller, simplified Alder Lake die. Because of this, our test Core i5-12600K only has 6 high-performance cores on board, supporting 12 logical threads and 4 additional power-efficient cores. The former can be accelerated to a frequency of 4.9 GHz, the ceiling of the latter is 3.6 GHz. The main rival of the novelty from the AMD camp is the 12-thread Ryzen 5 5600X processor based on the Zen 3 architecture.

Slightly faster Ryzen 5 5600X

In the synthetic CPU-Z and Cinebench tests, the new product from Intel is literally half a body away from the Ryzen 5 5600X - in most measurements, the advantage is 2-3%. In games, the Core i5-12600K and Ryzen 5 5600X show almost the same performance. The level of energy consumption also differs little. And it's great, because the older Core i9 from the Alder Lake family turned out to be seriously voracious. All things considered, the new Intel chip could cause a lot of excitement among gamers and people who need a fairly powerful and modern PC for work.

New processor - new motherboard

Prices will play a key role in this confrontation between Ryzen 5 and Core i5. Now in east european retail for both processors they ask plus or minus the same $400. In favor of Ryzen is the fact that this processor can be used with motherboards on the good old socket AM4. To work with the Core i5-12600K, you will need a new motherboard on the LGA1700 socket. And they are expensive. As for the use of DDR5 memory, so far there is no particular use from it - most synthetic tests in comparison with DDR4 received an increase in performance by literally 2 – 3%. For a Core i5-level processor, this is now superfluous.