Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake Core i5-12600K Benchmarked

Alder Lake and its partner, the Z690 series chipset, are expected to receive two new upgrades. One being PCIe 5.0 support which will offer PCI Express 5.0 bus, which offers 2x the bandwidth PCI Express 4.0, while the other is DDR5 RAM. Will either matter? While we wait, leaked benchmarks shows us the potential of DDR5 RAM paired with Alder Lake.

DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 are awesome piece of technology. However, the graphic cards do not bottleneck on the PCIe 4.0 top, which might change once RDNA 3 (AMD) and Ada Lovelace (NVIDIA) arrive.

Alder Lake AIDA64 Benchmark

SSD’s are also improving rapidly as of today; the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD has surpassed the 7,000MB/s mark. A slower SSD with a speed range of 550 to 580 MB/s also feels quite fast. However, Microsoft’s DirectStorage API could make faster SSDs more beneficial for gaming.

As far as the leaked scores are concerned, a well-known tipster @harukaze5719 posted an AIDA64 screenshot showing an unspecified amount of DDR5-6400 RAM paired up with an Intel 12th Gen Core i5-12600K.

In his initial tweet, the leakster mistakenly mentions the DDR5-4800 kit, which is the DDR5-6400 RAM. The memory benchmark results are impressive where the DDR4-4000 kit as read, write, and copy metrics lie in the 60,000MB/s range while the DDR5-6400 kit’s read speeds maxed out 90,000MB/s and were nearly as fast in writes and achieved 77,750MB/s in the copy benchmark.

Take note that the setup was running in Gear 4 mode, which is a new option on Z690 boards. Gear 4 has the controller running at 1/4 the data rate to keep things stable when running high-frequency RAM.

Intel Alder Lake CPU

The RAM was paired with Core i5-12600K, a processor with six high-performance Golden Cove cores operating at 3.7GHz to 4.9GHz, while four power-efficient Gracemont cores operate at 3.6GHz in a 10-core/16-thread configuration.

Another screenshot identifies the chip as an engineering sample with a 3.2GHz stock clock speed. It is quite high for an ES chip, so it is probably a later batch but not a qualification sample (QS). Irrespective of what category the chip falls in, it has been overclocked.

Intel Alder Lake Details 2

The rumor is that Alder Lake will be announced next month and will hit the markets in November, which means we can get reliable benchmarks in a few weeks.