The latest Intel processors for enthusiasts are here, and according to early reviews, l
Intel Core i9-12900K processors and also Intel Core i5-12600K processors are amazing processors They are ranked higher than the competition. If you want to upgrade to these new Intel processors, you'll also need to upgrade your motherboard and other aspects of your computer. This guide not only examines exactly which parts you would need to invest in, but also how far we were able to push the Intel Core i9 12900K processor with some overclocking tips. While the next full review of these processors is going to go into much more detail about the updates Intel has made to the platform, you should be aware of the new 12th generation processors and the new Intel Z690 chipset is the first platform to offer.
Support for PCI-express five and DDR5 memory.
NVME drives and graphics cards with PCIe 0 technology may not be available until the second half of 5, but DDRXNUMX memory is already here to add to your list of components that potentially require an upgrade. Although
Intel 12th generation processors can work with DDR4 memory and there are motherboards that support DDR4, a DDR5 solution is a better investment. You are about to buy a new processor and motherboard; You might as well bite the bullet and also buy DDR5 memory, which will be much more useful for future upgrades.
Construction
These are the three new components we used for this guide:
- Intel Core i9 12900K Processor
- MSI MEG Z690 Unify motherboard
- Corsair Dominator DDR5 5200Mhz (Kit 2 x 32Go CL38)
(Image credit: Avenir)
(Image credit: Avenir) The only other component you might need to upgrade would be your CPU cooler. Since the size of these new processors is different, their cooler's mounting location is slightly different as well. To prevent this from happening, some motherboard manufacturers such as ASUS have drilled two sets of holes to allow the old sockets to fit onto the new motherboard. But if that's not the case with the motherboard you get, then you should contact your cooler manufacturer to see if they can send you new backplates. If you're lucky, your backplate on the cooler may be adjustable, as was the case with the Corsair iCUE H150i Elite Capellix liquid processor cooler we used. Here are the rest of the components we used
- Zotac RTX 3070 Ti graphics card (PCI 4.0)
- Samsung 980 Pro SSD (PCI 4.0)
- Corsair HX750i 750-watt power supply
With the hardware in place, we were able to enlist the help of Tarek Hamdy, the renowned overclocking expert in the Middle East who holds overclocking records around the world.
(Image credit: Avenir) Before we get into overclocking, just a quick note about the motherboard and RAM we used for this guide. The MSI MEG Z690 Unify motherboard we used was sent to us by MSI focused on overclocking capabilities. It supports generation 5 in the first PCI-E slot with transfer bandwidth up to 128 Gb/s and has five M.2 slots, four of which support PCIe 4.0 speeds. It also has four RAM slots that support DDR5 memory up to 6666MHz. One of the best things about the MSI MEG Z690 Unify motherboard is that the LED that displays diagnostic trouble codes during boot changes to a CPU temperature monitor after boot, allowing you to know the temperature of your CPU. CPU. The RAM was sent to us by Corsair and is the Dominator Platinum RGB series. It was a 64GB kit with two 5GB DDR32 modules clocked at 5200MHz. DDR5 is a huge upgrade from DDR4 that offers a massive increase in bandwidth and performance.
overclocking
The new 12th generation Intel processors have two sets of cores: performance cores and efficiency cores. In the Core i9 12900K, you get eight performance cores and eight efficiency cores. These performance cores, by default, have voltages between 0.85 V and one 275 V and speeds between 3.2 GHz and 5.1 GHz. The exception to this are two specific cores that can go a bit higher at 5.2 GHz in our case. These nuclei are called gold nuclei. The first thing we did was update the Unify motherboard BIOS to the latest version available. Since this article is more about testing CPU performance, we primarily tested against Cinebench and AIDA 64, rather than PC gaming benchmarks that focused more on GPU performance.
(Image credit: Avenir) We start with the stock speeds and voltages on the processor and memory by loading "Optimized Defaults" into the BIOS, which sets the following parameters. At stock speed, we got a Cinebench score of 25,319. Before overclocking the processor, we wanted to observe the temperatures on it that our AIO cooler could handle. We did this by setting the processor voltage to 1.32V and running CineBench. As expected, the processor started to slow down when we hit 100°C. After playing around with the voltages a bit more, we settled on 1.27V which was the sweet spot for the 12900K. This level of voltage is also something an AIO cooler can handle.
(Image credit: Avenir) Our next step was to increase the processor multiplier to 52, effectively running the P cores at 5200 MHz. However, the processor would not boot and we stepped down to 5.1GHz which it showed and managed to run. ten full minutes of Cinebench test. We tried the same method on the E cores and after disabling Intel SpeedStep from the BIOS we ended up with a multiplier of 40. With this setting, the processor temperature hits 95C under load when running Cinebench, which is just below the 100 ° C mark at which the processor begins to choke. This resulted in our Cinebench R23 score of 27,596 points, which is about 10% higher than the 25,319 points we got at default voltage and speeds.
(Image credit: Avenir) Next, we wanted to try overclocking DDR5, which is a bit more finicky than DDR4. Our main goal was to achieve the highest speeds in the AIDA64 read/write/copy/latency tests. We returned the processor to default speeds and voltage and selected the XMP profile for the RAM which was 5200Mhz @ 38-38-38-82-2T VDD/VDDQ running at 1.25v. We kept an eye on DDR5's temperatures during testing, which reached just over 40°C; there was no cooling mounted to or directed at the RAM modules. Considering we're dealing with Micron chips in the RAM, we weren't expecting a huge jump in speed and the maximum we hit was 5400Mhz with decent CL settings. It's only 200Mhz in the XMP profile.
(Image credit: Avenir) To achieve these speeds we increased the voltage to 1.435v on both VDD/VDDQ and started driving the RAM from 5200Mhz to 5600Mhz at very slack times. The PC refused to start at 5600Mhz, but lowering it to 5400Mhz worked fine. We then started adjusting the table clocks, and after many different combinations, glitches, and restarts, we ended up with 36-39-29-74-2T. For some reason this MSI motherboard wouldn't change the After Pre time - whatever we selected would give 39. These are the AIDA64 results. In short, we were able to achieve a decent 10% increase in CPU performance with overclocking. We recommend using at least a good AIO cooler if you plan to overclock, but a custom kit will definitely give you better results. If you go the AIO route, you have to sub-volt the processor a bit to control temperatures. There wasn't much leeway with DDR5 overclocking; maybe because our modules used Micron chips. If you're lucky enough to get Hynix or Samsung, you might get better results. We also believe that the BIOS optimizations updates on the Z690 motherboard will help and hope that MSI will fix the Tras issue. However, you still get considerably better performance on DDR5 compared to DDR4.