THE NEWS
the beginning of the magazine, where the articles are small8 MAXIMU MPC JUN 2022
quickstart
Overclockers break records with the Core i9-12900KS
Intel’s hot new model
100MHz. It also supports
Intel’s Enhanced Thermal
Velocity Boost, and Adaptive
Boost Technology. The only
other real difference is the
cost—Intel’s recommended
price is $739-749, against a
regular i9-12900K’s $589-599.
So what are you paying
the extra for? It’s that binning
process that ensures you
have the best version of the
i9-12900 that Intel can find. Is
it quick? Of course! Far Cry 6 is
an average of 12 frames faster,
while Shadow of the Tomb
Raider gains 43 frames (useful
as the Ryzen 7 5800X3D would
otherwise beat Intel here).
Other benchmarks are
less dramatic with just a
few frames at 1080p, where
processor power counts, but
do you game at 1080p, and
what’s the point of super-high
frame rates? Benchmarks of
over 200fps are of academic
interest only. It’s certainly a
hot chip though, and quiteliterally too, as it can reach
over 100°C, so you’ll need
capable cooling.CLOCK WATCHING
That meticulous binning
process makes this an ideal
chip for extreme overclocking.
It wasn’t long before one of the
cores was taken to 7.45GHz.
According to one overclocker
called ‘Splave’, you can safely
run any i9-12900KS to 5.3GHz
on all cores with liquid cooling.
Nearly all manage 5.4GHz and
a few will even reach 5.5GHz.
He didn’t stop there. Aided
by copious amounts of liquid
nitrogen, he took one chip to
7.8GHz on all cores on CPU-Z.
He then took every benchmark
record with it, including
Cinebench R20 running at
7.1GHz using all threads. This
reached a score of over 15,000.
For comparison, the standard
i9-12900K manages 10,000.
Do we want one? Of course,
because who wouldn’t want to
own the world’s fastest gaming
chip? But it’s also expensive.
The recommended price is
bad enough, but they’re also
currently going for a premium,
so you’re looking at $800 in
the real world. The chip it was
built to beat, AMD’s 5800X3D,
costs just $449, which is not a
flattering comparison.
Running at stock speeds,
the performance gain over the
vanilla 12900K is minimal. But
for dedicated overclockers,
the KS model is a clear winner.
Officially, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D
doesn’t support overclocking,
but that hasn’t stopped peoplefrom having a go. With the
right motherboard, you can
crank it up to 5.14GHz. Ryzens
rarely make good candidates
for overclocking as most are
sold with little performance
left to squeeze out.
AMD hasn’t abandoned
overclocking completely.
There was a tantalizing post
during a ‘webinar’ from
Joseph Tao, Memory Enabling
Manager at AMD (yes, a real job
title). He claimed that with the
forthcoming Zen 4 platform
“we’re going to try to make a
big splash with overclocking”,
and “speeds that you maybe
thought wouldn’t be possible,
may be possible”. Sounds as
though AMD is going to let
people push DDR5 at least.
This fall, we’ll see Zen 4
arrive from AMD and Raptor
Lake from Intel, kicking off
the fight once again with a new
generation of processors. The
5nm Zen 4 has reached pre-
production and promises a 15
percent performance bump
and significantly lower power
consumption. You’ll also gain
DDR5, PCIe 5.0 support, and
possibly V-cache too.
Rumor has it that Intel’s
Raptor Lake will push clock
speeds to 5.8GHz with its
halo chip. It will also feature
more efficiency cores, and
a performance jump of over
10 percent above Alder Lake
is expected. Given its cost
and the imminent arrival of
these next-gen processors,
the i9-12900KS seems like a
ludicrous processor in many
ways, but also glorious. –CLTHE CROWN for making the
world’s fastest gaming chip
may ultimately be a hollow
one, but Intel and AMD take
it seriously. AMD’s Zen
architecture may give Intel
a hard time in many areas,
but that final accolade never
quite falls into its grasp—and
Intel is keen to make sure it
doesn’t. When AMD’s cache-
heavy Ryzen 7 5800X3D was
announced, you knew Intel
would answer back. It has,
with the Special Edition Core
i9-12900KS: a chip that only
really exists to break records.
It’s a classic Intel response
that we’ve seen before: take an
existing chip, carefully ‘bin’ it
(essentially use quality control
testing to pick only the most
robust silicon), and you have
a new halo processor, without
producing any new silicon.
The Core i9-12900KS is
a faster i9-12900K, up from
a maximum turbo speed
of 5.2GHz to 5.5GHz on two
cores, a modest 5.8 percent
bump. The all-core Turbo
remains at 5.2GHz, while
power requirements have
been increased by 25W to
150W. The base clock for the
performance cores has gained
200MHz to 3.4GHz, while the
efficiency cores get an extraThe Special Edition Core
i9-12900KS is a chip that
only exists to break records. © INTEL