INTEL’SCOREI 7 and i 9 chips are all-
round performance leaders, at least
within Intel’s own range of CPUs. But
for gamers, it’s actually the Core i 5 that
rules. Cheaper than an i 7 or i9, i 5 chips
usually give up significant multi-threaded
throughput but more or less match their
more expensive siblings when it comes to
in-game frame rates.
With the Core i5- 126 00K, the first
Core i5 of the Alder Lake generation, that
usual refrain may actually understate
its abilities. That’s because the 126 00K
is something even more impressive
entirely. In many ways, it matches Intel’s
previous-gen top chip, even in multi-
threading, but in a package that’s almost
half the price. That’s Core i9 performance
for Core i5 money.
The 126 00K is a six-plus-four design.
It has six Performance Cores (P-Cores)
and four Efficient Cores (E-Cores). This
is Intel’s new hybrid approach to CPU
design, which we reviewed last month
in the top-end Core i9-1 29 00K. The
Performance Cores are codenamed
Golden Cove and deliver maximum grunt
at the highest possible clock speeds.
Meanwhile, the Efficient Cores are
based on the Gracemont architecture,
essentially a derivative of Intel’s low-
power Atom processor. They physically
use much less die space and consume far
less power. That does not, however, mean
they are useless for serious computing
tasks. Intel has said that Gracemont
cores are roughly on a par with the old
Skylake design of 2015 when it comes to
single-threaded performance per clock.Give it up for the new gaming champIntel Core i 5 - 12600 K
9VERDICT Intel Corei 9 - 12600 KA NEW HOPE Awesome gaming
performance; much better
power consumption than
the 12 900K.
PHANTOM MENACE DRM issues with
some games; hybrid architecture
somewhat unproven.
$319, http://www.intel.comSPECIFICATIONS
Cores/Threads 6/12 P + 4/ 4 E
Base/Turbo Clock 3.7 / 4.9GHz
Architecture Alder^ Lake
Lithography Intel 7 (10nm SuperFin)
Memory Support
DDR5 @ 128GB
(4800MT/s) / DDR4 @
128GB (3200MT/s)
PCIe Support PCIe 5.0 x16 (Graphics),
PCIe 4.0 x4 (Storage)
Integrated Graphics Intel UHD Graphics 770
TDP 125-150WAnyway, the total core count is higher
than the old 116 00K, which was a six-
core chip, though it’s worth noting that
the 126 00K’s overall thread count comes
to 1 6, since those Gracemont cores don’t
support HyperThreading. Put another
way, with the 126 00K, you’re getting
six high-performance cores, just like
the 116 00K but with higher per-core
performance, plus those four high-
efficiency cores. However you slice it,
that looks like a big upgrade on paper.
As for the finer details, both P-Core
and E-Core share access to 20MB of Intel
Smart Cache (L3), with a maximum Turbo
frequency of 4.9GHz for the P Cores and
3.6GHz for the E Cores. According to
Intel’s new power metrics, the 126 00K’s
Base power is 125 W with a Max Turbo
power of 150 W. The latter is much lower
than the 241 W maximum of the 129 00K,
immediately addressing that chip’s most
obvious flaw, excess power consumption.
All of the above is delivered via Intel’s
10nm process tech, now rebranded
Intel 7. Alder Lake is therefore the first
10nm Intel desktop chip family. But how
good, exactly, is the 126 00K at gaming?
Absolutely outstanding is the answer. It
blasts through our benchmarking suite,
only just falling behind the much more
expensive Core i9-1 29 00K in a few titles.
More importantly, it squarely
hammers the old Core i9-1 190 0K flagship
CPU in every game benchmark we ran.
It’s also far ahead of the AMD Ryzen
5 5 600X, an important outcome for
Intel’s quest to regain all-round gaming
supremacy. The one snag within thisstory of untrammeled conquest involves
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. It simply will
not boot on either of our Intel Alder Lake
test systems, an ongoing issue that’s
likely related to the DRM issues Intel has
officially confirmed with Alder Lake.
As for broader performance, the
126 00K also crushes the Core i9-1 190 0K
in multi-threaded testing. The same goes
for the Ryzen 5 5600 X. Perhaps that’s not
surprising, given it has more physical
cores than either. But it just shows those
E Cores really do boost multi-threaded
workloads. They’re not just there to sip
power, even if the 126 00K beats the old
119 00K while consuming far less juice.
Of course, some doubts remain over
both the aforementioned DRM issues and
the wider question of thread scheduling
in Windows, plus the question of how
performance is load-balanced across
cores with hybrid architectures. We may
yet find edge case scenarios where the
hybrid approach is problematic. Those
caveats aside, the 12 600K jumps straight
to the top of our gaming CPU leaderboard.
Where the sheer thirst for power of
the bigger 129 00K makes us slightly
uneasy, the 126 00K is much easier to
wholeheartedly recommend. It’s a killer
gaming CPU. – JACOB RIDLEYBENCHMARKS
Intel Core i9- 1 K AMD Ryzen 9 5600 X
CineBench R23 Single (Index) 1,810 1505
CineBench R23 Multi (Index) 16,863 10404
X265 v5.0 (avg fps) 52 37
Total War: Three Kingdoms
(DX11) @ 1080p (avg fps)^206189
Far Cry 6 (DX12) @ 10 80p (avg fps) 127 122
3D Mark: Timespy CPU Score 13,335 7786
Peak package power (watts) 113 76
Recommended Retail Price ($) $289 $299
Best scores in bold. Test bed consists of an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero, 32GB (2x16GB) Corsair Dominator
Platinum RGB DDR5 @ 5, 200 MT/s, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3 080, 1TB WD Black SN850 PCIe 4.0 SSD, and
an NZXT 850W PSU. All tests performed on Windows 11 on the highest preset available.