Intel Core i7-12700K & 12700KF CPU Review, Benchmarks, & Efficiency vs. AMD Ryzen

**The Rise of Competing Pricing: Intel's New Approach**

Intel has taken a bold step by releasing their 12th Gen Core processors, including the 12700k and 12700F, at prices that are more competitive with AMD. The introduction of pricing as a key differentiator is a significant shift in strategy for Intel, which has traditionally focused on showcasing the performance and features of their CPUs over price. This new approach may help Intel appeal to customers who are looking for value in their processor purchases.

**A Look at the 12700k: Can it Compete with AMD?**

The 12700k is a powerful processor that boasts high clock speeds and multiple cores, making it an attractive option for gamers and content creators. With its base price of around $430, the 12700k offers competitive pricing to AMD's Ryzen 7000 series. However, Intel has also released the 12700F variant, which omits the integrated GPU (IGP) in favor of a more affordable price point. The question on everyone's mind is: should you choose the K or F version?

**The Value of Integrated Graphics**

For those who value having an IGP for troubleshooting purposes, such as identifying display issues or checking graphics performance, the 12700k's integrated GPU may be worth the extra cost. Additionally, the IGP can also be useful for quick sync tasks that don't require intense graphics processing. However, if budget is a concern, opting for the F variant may provide significant savings without sacrificing too much in terms of overall performance.

**AMD's Response: A Price War Unfolds**

AMD has traditionally held a price advantage over Intel when it comes to their Ryzen processors. However, with Intel now competing on price, AMD may need to rethink its pricing strategy. The 5800X, for example, can be found at prices as low as $300 in some cases, making it an attractive option for those who want to stay within budget without sacrificing too much performance.

**The Impact of Hubris and Confidence**

Both Intel and NVIDIA have historically been known for their confidence in their products, which has sometimes led to price increases. However, with the 12700k and F variant, Intel is signaling that it's willing to compete on price to stay relevant in the market. This shift may be a response to AMD's recent success with their Ryzen processors.

**Long-term Implications: A New Normal for PC Hardware**

The rise of competing pricing means that customers will have more options than ever before when choosing between Intel and AMD. While both companies still offer significant performance advantages, price is becoming an increasingly important factor in the decision-making process. As consumers become more savvy about the value they're getting from their purchases, we can expect to see even more aggressive pricing strategies emerge.

**The Verdict: Should You Choose the 12700k or F Variant?**

Ultimately, the choice between the 12700k and 12700F depends on your specific needs and priorities. If you value having an IGP for troubleshooting purposes or quick sync tasks, the K variant may be worth the extra cost. However, if budget is a concern, opting for the F variant could provide significant savings without sacrificing too much in terms of overall performance.

**Conclusion: Stay Informed with Gamers Nexus**

At Gamers Nexus, we're committed to providing you with accurate and unbiased information about PC hardware. From benchmarks to reviews, we'll continue to guide you through the complex world of computer components. Whether you're a gamer, content creator, or simply someone who wants to stay informed about the latest tech trends, we invite you to subscribe for more in-depth articles like this one.

**Additional Resources**

For bonus content and exclusive videos, be sure to check out our Patreon page at patreon.com/gamersnexus. We also offer a range of PC hardware accessories, including modmats and toolkits, available exclusively on our online store at store.camerasnexus.net.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday we're reviewing the intel i7 12700k we also bought the kf sku that's right f skew from intel uh so we bought both those 450 is what we paid retail for the k sku and then we paid 430 for the kf if you don't remember the f means that there's no igp and if all of those letters don't mean anything it boils down to integrated graphics so we're looking at these cvs today we've already reviewed the 12 900k the 12 600k now we're coming in with the cpu that slots in right between those two in terms of price and that'll round out the stack from what intel has released so far with alderley before that this video is brought to you by squarespace we use squarespace for our own gn store and juggle complex multi-piece orders all the time with it squarespace makes it fast for us to roll out new products with detailed pages full of galleries videos and descriptors it's also useful for your own resume sites for photographer or project portfolios or for starting your new small business idea there's never been a better time to try and start your new business than right now and we can vouch that squarespace makes it easy visit squarespace.com gamersnexus to get 10 off your first purchase with squarespace so from what we've seen so far the 12700k appears to still be available at least at the time of filming which is sunday night after the launch for this set of processors being november 7th 8th and they came out on the 4th so that seems to be the one that's in the highest supply the biggest issue right now it looks like is going to be ddr5 availability as a reminder however these do work with ddr4 not at the same time you can't one they're not physically compatible ddr4 and five they do not sock it into the same socket physically and two if you happen to find a board that have both ddr4 and five on them and i haven't personally looked for these but traditionally there's at least one out there during the switchover period there's gonna be two slots that do one tech and then two slots to do the other and you can't combine them anyway you could do ddr4 with this if you have trouble finding five but the point is the 12700k and the kf seem to be still available uh 450 430 is what you can expect to pay usd if it's being sold by the retailer directly anyway and the specs for them so it's got eight performance cores and four efficient cores we've been calling these p cores and e cores if you're not familiar with this terminology and you don't know the specifics of it but you would like to learn you can watch our architecture piece where patrick stone on our team with a computer engineering background wrote up the script to talk about the architectural details the 12700 series is 20 threads in total for the k and the kf there will likely be a non k non kf skew in the future intel claims 5 gigahertz for the maximum frequency it says 4.9 for turbo and 3.6 to 3.8 for the e core maximum frequency the biggest difference between the 12 700k and the 12 900k other than the e core count is the tdp it's that simple where they're both 125 watt base but the 12 700 k and the kf have a 190 watt maximum turbo power rating which is contingent on things like motherboard settings and vcore and the 12 900 k runs a 241 watt maximum turbo power so there are other changes the 12 900k has four more e cores that will show up in applications like blender where yes even though the e cores are uh sound far less interesting or or far less effective than the performance cores they're still fully functional cores they're just a bit slower so that's the difference between them the power number is going to surface mostly in things like efficiency where the 12 700 you should see a trend develop where it's more efficient for the work getting done than the 12 900k typically the way this works is with any any silicon gpus or cpus or memory even as the uh effective performance ramps and approaches its maximum limitation in terms of frequency the efficiency or the performance per watt falls off in a non-linear fashion you especially see this with gpus whereas you approach the high end or you do liquid nitrogen overclocking like we've done you might end up taking a card that was 300 watts to a thousand watts but those last 600 watts you're not really adding a lot over the first 100 watts of overclocking that you did so that's the angle to keep in mind is that the 12700 should show better power efficiency than the 12 9 because it's operating closer to its optimal range instead of being pushed to get that flagship halo effect that the 12 9 was going for enough of the basics for this one as always we'll link the other reviews in the description below if you want to see our 12600k review our 12 900k review uh or additional information our 12 900k review is the one that will have information on the testing platforms we talked about the coolers used we talked about the memories the motherboard used and the bio settings all of that is in the 12 900k review we're not going to go over it here again because it's redundant and then additionally we talked about our choice of windows 10 versus windows 11 in the 12 900k review we have data for both now we've published a sort of recap of them and you can check that on the channel if you're interested specifically in that data but let's get started with the 12700k and the kf uh review and results we'll start this one with power consumption since it's the primary difference between the 12 900k and the 12700k aside from the e core difference in a blender all core workload and measured after five minutes of execution meaning that tau has expired on cpus where it's relevant the intel i7 12700k ended up at 158 watts for full and constant load that's significantly less than the 12900k which plotted at 244 watts that's basically an hddt cpu actually it is an hddt cpu and power consumption anyway the 12700k is therefore comparable to the 3900x in powerdraw or about 25 watts more than what we tested on the r9 5900x that 25 watt difference works out to about 19 percent more power consumption on the 12700k the 5950x is a better bin and capable of running at lower v core than the 5900x at least an hour testing and therefore runs it more efficiently than the others so that explains why you see the numbers you do in a single threaded workload the 12700k consumed about 32 watts during cinebench 1 tile or one thread rendering that's with vrm efficiency losses as always and doesn't include the rest of the system this is by design so that we can isolate the cpu the 12700k ends up about the same as the 10 900k for one third power consumption and is technically lower in power consumption than the 5900x and 5950x but not by so much that it makes much difference it is a technical victory though for what that's worth as we've discussed for the 12 900k and 12600k reviews we are actively working on new metrics and benchmarks for efficiency calculations meaning that we're coupling power consumption and performance as right now we have decoupled them for a sterilized analysis coupling them will give us another angle though but that'll be a separate piece frequency validation will help us determine the differences between the 12 900k and 12 700k beyond the obvious in an all-core workload with blender we monitored frequency for about 25 minutes and we scaled the chart into these findings the 12700k p core average fluctuated but was typically in the range of 4 500 to 4 600 megahertz the 12 700 k's e core performance or the efficiency core set closer to 3 600 megahertz with occasional dips to 35. for the 12 900k frequency sat at 4 900 megahertz flat this will contribute to performance differences favoring the 12900k even if the core account is underutilized on it the 12900k e-core result was also higher at 3 700 megahertz single threaded behavior had the maximum frequency per interval at 5 gigahertz with the e-cores at 3.8 gigahertz the 12-900k was closer to 5.2 on the p-cores instead and again that will contribute to some of the performance differences we'll see later blender cycles rendering on the cpu will be up first for our production benchmarks in this one the intel i7 12700k finished the render in about 12 minutes which marks it as roughly equivalent to the r9 5900x a 500 ish dollar cpu at its launch while we purchased the 12700k for about 450 that's to say nothing of course of the cheaper kf but then again it's also to say nothing of the ddr5 memory prices and availability although you could run this with d4 worst case the two are at near parity and performance while amd remains the efficiency king the 12900k propels itself to 9.4 minutes partly thanks to the extra four cores they are still cores after all just a bit slower but it does so at the cost of a 54 increase in power consumption and a variable increase in price maybe about 22 to 44 depending on the retailer and that's compared to the 12 700 k of course the 12 900k is therefore 18 faster to render but 54 more power hungry than the 12 7. the 12 6 meanwhile allows the 12 7 a lead of 22 percent andy is winning an efficiency but intel is a fierce competitor here and it's especially strong as a price competitor price is where amd has competed with intel for years so the favor is now being returned in full this is promising that is one of the most exciting cbu cycles since the 8700k versus the 2700x so we're happy to see the competition in code compiled chromium on windows the 12700k required 57 minutes to complete the work requiring about 3 percent less time than the r9 5900x the 12900k finished 14 faster than the 127k so it is better but the value of that improvement will be contingent on its price we're not sure where the 12.9 has been selling right now launch day seems to indicate a range of 550 to 650 but uh we didn't get to see them in stock long enough to really take notice of it so either way it's 22 to 44 more expensive for 14 faster compile time and 54 more power consumption amd then remains competitive but intel is pulling ahead in raw performance or minimally again is at parity for price comparative cpus the 12700k is far more efficient than the 12 900k and is within 20 percent of the power of the 5900x and the should be worried but it's not at a total loss yet this is good to see because it'll push both companies forward adobe premiere is what interests us the most as we're considering pulling one of these cpus for an upcoming production pc build for andrew in aggregate the 12700k scored 959 points for filters render live playback and coding and effect that ranks it as behind the 5950x which leads by just 1.6 percent while costing 300 more in retail than the raw cpu price this is extremely competitive for intel which also benefits from quick sync on the non-fskew of the 12700k and to be clear for the youtube demonetization gods that's f sku not not something else the 12 900k led the 1200k by 8 hardly worth it for the power or the price the 12600k also came close to the 12700k which only held an advantage again of seven percent the 5800x gets dropped here down to 849 points or a 13 lead for the 12 700k the 5800x recently got a price drop though at some retailers so if that persists and it's wider spread than just micro center it'll be worthy once again of consideration adobe photoshop had the 12700k at 12 10 points in aggregate with the 12 900k leading by 11 the 5950x falls behind the much cheaper 12 700k as does the 5900x the 12600k is close by also again only led by 7 via the 12700k one has to wonder why intel thought launching the 11900k would be worth the reputational damage when looking at these results though it's the perfect example of sunk cost fallacy compression testing looks comparatively better for amd at least with decompression in compression though the 12700k executed 111 000 mips or millions of instructions per second versus the 5900 x's 12 higher 124k mips the 12 900k ranks similarly ahead with the 5950x holding a more meaningful lead here than before the 12700k ends up comparable to the 3900x or ahead of the 5800x by about 19 decompression shuffles the stack considerably the 12700k now falls below the 5800x despite leading in compression previously although the lead in compression is greater than the loss and decompression is the 12 900k is now 21 ahead of the 12 700k with the 5900x a staggering 48 percent ahead of the 12700k andy is particularly strong in decompression gaming benchmarks are up now hitman 3 is more memory sensitive than some of our other benchmarks making for a particularly interesting comparison for the cpus the 12700k ran at 193 fps average leading the 12 600k by four percent and being led by the 12 9 by 5 compared to amd that means the 12700k holds an 8 lead over the 5900x in average fps or 14 lead over the 5800x for lows the 12700k maintains proportional frame time pacing as reflected in one percent and 0.1 values there's nothing too exciting to look at here the low gaps between the amd cpus don't exit what we'd expect and neither part has a noteworthy advantage in that camp in cs go at 1080p which is entirely cpu bound as we'll show in our 1440p tests the 12700k ran at 332 fps average outranking the 10900k from last generation and pulling ahead of the 12 600k by 14 that means the 5600x through the 5950x all enjoy a lead over the 12 700k unique to this benchmark at least the way we conduct it andy does well here the 12900k has been retested a few times and always lands on the same spot at least it does with windows 10 not 11 as we showed before this has it about 11 percent ahead of the 12700k in windows 10 for reference and so amd is a strong competitor in this one but intel is finally beginning to claw back its gaming performance after a tough previous generation 1440p really just reaffirms previous positioning it shows us that we're not even gpu bound at 1440p and therefore certainly not at 1080p the scaling on the result stack is the same in this set of data as a result red dead 2 is sort of the antithesis of the previous benchmark as it becomes more bound up in the gpu with our test settings this means that it isn't a pure cpu benchmark but it's still useful as a representation of what happens and how scaling changes as other binds are introduced this is more realistic perhaps but it's also less useful for determining the maximum delta between cpus it is therefore imperfect and not how we'd prefer to run the testing but uh for now until we modify the test setup this is what it'll be the 12 7k and the 12 9k are about the same here as are the 11 7k and the 10900k entries the 5950x and 5900x do fall behind but not by as much as in some of the other tests due to the gpu constraint the 12600k more notably falls off as does the 5600x where the 12700k holds about a 10 lead for each plus or minus a little bit the dip in 0.1 percent lows for the 12 900k is due to bouncing off of the gpu limiter we see this in some games but more specifically we've seen it in rage games or the rockstar game engine games that's because the gpu limit screws with some of the frame time pacing a bit at least in this title and it's an observable effect we've seen elsewhere as we showed in our windows 11 versus 10 testing on alder like the biggest uplift from the os change was actually not really in raw performance it was in getting alder like functional in some applications total war was the only game we've tested so far that was buggy enough to not even launch on windows 10 with alderlake but our understanding is that microsoft and intel are addressing drm specific issues causing similar behavior regardless until we can run the 12700k on windows 11 we don't have data for it in three kingdoms as it was still unable to get past the game's menu with windows 10. this will likely be fixed but general compatibility remains the best reason so far for running windows 11 on the 12th gen tpus far cry 6 is brand new to our test suite in this one the 12700k ran at 143 fps average but had problematic lows retested on the 12900k did eventually produce better results but we've been unable to yield the same uplift on the 12 700k or 12600k proportional to the average with additional test passes as a note we do a minimum of four test passes but some of these cpus have received up to 12 for validation we'll look at frame time plotting momentarily to better understand why these dips are emerging an average fps alone the 12700k and 5900x are about equal with the 5800x not far behind about 4.4 percent ahead of the 12 700k the lowest favorite amd and older intel here however so that's something we need to look at here's a frame time plot to better understand the situation here the intel 12700k mostly runs extremely low frame times at around six to eight milliseconds which is why we saw such a high average fps occasionally we encounter spikes to 10 27 or 30 milliseconds and so on these spikes are what average into the reduced 0.1 low number that number is just an indicator for us really to trigger a deeper dive or investigation into the frame to frame metrics for a given test which is what we see here we aren't seeing any massive spikes that would be jarring stutters of say a tenth of a second but these spikes are still noticeable as slight juddering during gameplay the 5800x provides perspective as to what the line should look like it's more consistent it's flatter and it has fewer excursions from the mean which is what we want to see in cyberpunk 2077 now updated to the latest version before alder lake's launch we measured the 12700k just below the 109 and the 12900k we're gpu bound here finally thanks to cdpr updating the game to a better code base the differences on this chart are basically irrelevant once you get above the 5600x we need more cpu bound scenarios which we've presented earlier to see true scaling still this is at least useful for showing what you can expect when bound somewhere else for where the falloff point is finally in f1 2021 the intel 1200k held 326 fps average in our testing conditions when stock bumping off the same limit as the 12900k as f121 is an update to our test suite we still need to investigate whether this is a memory or a gpu bind that we're seeing for now we're assuming it's a gpu bond as a result of this there's again not much difference in this result stack like cyberpunk we'd refer you instead to our csgo and some of the other earlier results to get more valuable data for raw scaling remember this also this is a brand new test bench suite for us with all new data and we made it while moving so we'll be tweaking it over the coming month or two and removing or modifying games to establish more useful differences so at the end of all this then the 12700k continues the trend of alder like thus far which is that it's far more competitive really than anything it's launched recently we said this last review too where we're not sure if intel was trying to prime us for this review by launching incredibly impressively boring things for the last well the last generation especially 11 series but generations before that as well or if it was an accident and it just worked out that way in either case alder lake is actually very interesting the 12 series is very interesting and now finally intel's pr people will have videos from us that they can distribute internally and say look steve doesn't hate everything we make he does in fact like things when they're good and they make sense so this falls in that camp where the 12 600k the 12 900k we could find arguments for them the 12 6 is easier to argue for than the 12 9 12 9 is a good performer but it's a flagship product it costs a flagship product's price and you get fall off for as always it's a non-linear increase in the uplift in performance versus the increase and perceived value of your computer if you care about the specs listing on a forum in your signature but the 12700k typically these cpus like the 5800x the 3700x the 1100 700k the 10700k these cpus we don't normally care for out the gate typically what happens is over time as their prices fall about 50 to 100 we warm up to them and we say okay now the 10 700k makes sense because it's cheaper than it was at launch and the 1100 700k is kind of dumb uh so that's where we start to open up to it whereas initially we'll say this is just like a weird stopgap filler pointless product the same goes for the 5800x where at launch we were uninterested in it because the 5900x made far more sense for someone who is more core intensive and the 5600x you save money you could put it towards a gpu or something it was a different time back then for something that's more gaming focused but over time those cps make sense the 5800x we saw recently dropped to 300 or something on a micro center or something like that and we don't i don't really live near a micro center we don't consider them in our sort of retailer scope of pricing normally but if you can get a 5800x for 300 bucks it's far more interesting than it is at whatever it was before that the 400s and the 12700k forces sort of a price reduction on those parts because if you get the 12700k the prices we did 430 if you don't care about the igp for the kf that's a decent that's like a competitive price intel's competing on price which is not something intel typically does intel and nvidia both have a tremendous amount of hubris and it bleeds through into their pricing where neither company historically has wanted to reduce its pricing to compete with amd on price because both want to maintain this to project this image of a certain level of quality and it's worked to some extent but intel has lost that ability as it's lost confidence in the products so anyway now they're competing on price 12700k uh we can see an argument for it for sure we are going to put probably the ksc after we're done with igp testing the case scheme we bought we're probably going to put in a production machine and see how we feel about it and sort of a long-term video editing photoshop unreal engine heavy environment andrew will be using it and see how it feels in real life now for the most part benchmarks represent real life usage but sometimes we found like with the 3175x it just it doesn't quite behave the same way once you put it to use uh so we will be doing that with the 12700k we intend to do igp benchmarks as well the if you're wondering should i buy the k or the kf model the argument we would make for one over the other would simply be if you think there's value in having an igp for troubleshooting like if you don't get display out and you want to troubleshoot is it is it my video card or is it something else it's helpful to have the igp even if perhaps you won't use it beyond that and to which extents you could maybe argue also that it's wasteful or you won't get enough use to justify the cost pump uh and you're kind of gambling on it in a sense breaking and needing it anyway the igp is also useful for quick sync for lower power consumption tasks if you don't want to spin up the gpu for it assuming you're working in some kind of application that's intelligent enough to make this decision actively and several of them are then that's where we would argue for the igp but you do save a little bit of money by going for the f version and that extra 20 bucks may be more useful if you're on a really tight budget and you're trying to get the maximum you can out of it in which case extra 20 maybe helps offsets on the motherboard or the memory cost or something like that so we are not going to tell you which one to choose if you're choosing between them because it's up to your use case and that gives you enough information to make an informed decision do i really care about having troubleshooting abilities and quick sync if you do video editing you might care about quick sync and certain other types of applications out there care as well but if you're just gaming maybe go for the the f variant instead if you're buying a dedicated gpu versus amd the 5800 x we would need to see a more permanent or widespread price reduction in order to consider it price for price the 12 700 makes more sense in decompression amd has a significant technology advantage in some of the benchmarks but for the most part intel is pulling ahead here amd remains the efficiency kin right now where intel is reminding us of amd in the past it's competing on price and it's a little bit power hungry in its effort to try and compete the 1200k is incredibly power hungry it's great for heating a room but there's more to that story too and we're going to look at that in a separate video so subscribe for that hopefully this gives you a good enough set of data to work from to see if you want the 12700k and uh as always subscribe for more go to patreon.comgamersnexus for bonus videos and write-ups you can also go to store.camerasnexus.net if you'd like to grab one of our modmats or toolkits which are on backorder now or one of our wireframe desk sized mouse mats for your keyboard and mouse thank you for watching as always we'll see you all next timetoday we're reviewing the intel i7 12700k we also bought the kf sku that's right f skew from intel uh so we bought both those 450 is what we paid retail for the k sku and then we paid 430 for the kf if you don't remember the f means that there's no igp and if all of those letters don't mean anything it boils down to integrated graphics so we're looking at these cvs today we've already reviewed the 12 900k the 12 600k now we're coming in with the cpu that slots in right between those two in terms of price and that'll round out the stack from what intel has released so far with alderley before that this video is brought to you by squarespace we use squarespace for our own gn store and juggle complex multi-piece orders all the time with it squarespace makes it fast for us to roll out new products with detailed pages full of galleries videos and descriptors it's also useful for your own resume sites for photographer or project portfolios or for starting your new small business idea there's never been a better time to try and start your new business than right now and we can vouch that squarespace makes it easy visit squarespace.com gamersnexus to get 10 off your first purchase with squarespace so from what we've seen so far the 12700k appears to still be available at least at the time of filming which is sunday night after the launch for this set of processors being november 7th 8th and they came out on the 4th so that seems to be the one that's in the highest supply the biggest issue right now it looks like is going to be ddr5 availability as a reminder however these do work with ddr4 not at the same time you can't one they're not physically compatible ddr4 and five they do not sock it into the same socket physically and two if you happen to find a board that have both ddr4 and five on them and i haven't personally looked for these but traditionally there's at least one out there during the switchover period there's gonna be two slots that do one tech and then two slots to do the other and you can't combine them anyway you could do ddr4 with this if you have trouble finding five but the point is the 12700k and the kf seem to be still available uh 450 430 is what you can expect to pay usd if it's being sold by the retailer directly anyway and the specs for them so it's got eight performance cores and four efficient cores we've been calling these p cores and e cores if you're not familiar with this terminology and you don't know the specifics of it but you would like to learn you can watch our architecture piece where patrick stone on our team with a computer engineering background wrote up the script to talk about the architectural details the 12700 series is 20 threads in total for the k and the kf there will likely be a non k non kf skew in the future intel claims 5 gigahertz for the maximum frequency it says 4.9 for turbo and 3.6 to 3.8 for the e core maximum frequency the biggest difference between the 12 700k and the 12 900k other than the e core count is the tdp it's that simple where they're both 125 watt base but the 12 700 k and the kf have a 190 watt maximum turbo power rating which is contingent on things like motherboard settings and vcore and the 12 900 k runs a 241 watt maximum turbo power so there are other changes the 12 900k has four more e cores that will show up in applications like blender where yes even though the e cores are uh sound far less interesting or or far less effective than the performance cores they're still fully functional cores they're just a bit slower so that's the difference between them the power number is going to surface mostly in things like efficiency where the 12 700 you should see a trend develop where it's more efficient for the work getting done than the 12 900k typically the way this works is with any any silicon gpus or cpus or memory even as the uh effective performance ramps and approaches its maximum limitation in terms of frequency the efficiency or the performance per watt falls off in a non-linear fashion you especially see this with gpus whereas you approach the high end or you do liquid nitrogen overclocking like we've done you might end up taking a card that was 300 watts to a thousand watts but those last 600 watts you're not really adding a lot over the first 100 watts of overclocking that you did so that's the angle to keep in mind is that the 12700 should show better power efficiency than the 12 9 because it's operating closer to its optimal range instead of being pushed to get that flagship halo effect that the 12 9 was going for enough of the basics for this one as always we'll link the other reviews in the description below if you want to see our 12600k review our 12 900k review uh or additional information our 12 900k review is the one that will have information on the testing platforms we talked about the coolers used we talked about the memories the motherboard used and the bio settings all of that is in the 12 900k review we're not going to go over it here again because it's redundant and then additionally we talked about our choice of windows 10 versus windows 11 in the 12 900k review we have data for both now we've published a sort of recap of them and you can check that on the channel if you're interested specifically in that data but let's get started with the 12700k and the kf uh review and results we'll start this one with power consumption since it's the primary difference between the 12 900k and the 12700k aside from the e core difference in a blender all core workload and measured after five minutes of execution meaning that tau has expired on cpus where it's relevant the intel i7 12700k ended up at 158 watts for full and constant load that's significantly less than the 12900k which plotted at 244 watts that's basically an hddt cpu actually it is an hddt cpu and power consumption anyway the 12700k is therefore comparable to the 3900x in powerdraw or about 25 watts more than what we tested on the r9 5900x that 25 watt difference works out to about 19 percent more power consumption on the 12700k the 5950x is a better bin and capable of running at lower v core than the 5900x at least an hour testing and therefore runs it more efficiently than the others so that explains why you see the numbers you do in a single threaded workload the 12700k consumed about 32 watts during cinebench 1 tile or one thread rendering that's with vrm efficiency losses as always and doesn't include the rest of the system this is by design so that we can isolate the cpu the 12700k ends up about the same as the 10 900k for one third power consumption and is technically lower in power consumption than the 5900x and 5950x but not by so much that it makes much difference it is a technical victory though for what that's worth as we've discussed for the 12 900k and 12600k reviews we are actively working on new metrics and benchmarks for efficiency calculations meaning that we're coupling power consumption and performance as right now we have decoupled them for a sterilized analysis coupling them will give us another angle though but that'll be a separate piece frequency validation will help us determine the differences between the 12 900k and 12 700k beyond the obvious in an all-core workload with blender we monitored frequency for about 25 minutes and we scaled the chart into these findings the 12700k p core average fluctuated but was typically in the range of 4 500 to 4 600 megahertz the 12 700 k's e core performance or the efficiency core set closer to 3 600 megahertz with occasional dips to 35. for the 12 900k frequency sat at 4 900 megahertz flat this will contribute to performance differences favoring the 12900k even if the core account is underutilized on it the 12900k e-core result was also higher at 3 700 megahertz single threaded behavior had the maximum frequency per interval at 5 gigahertz with the e-cores at 3.8 gigahertz the 12-900k was closer to 5.2 on the p-cores instead and again that will contribute to some of the performance differences we'll see later blender cycles rendering on the cpu will be up first for our production benchmarks in this one the intel i7 12700k finished the render in about 12 minutes which marks it as roughly equivalent to the r9 5900x a 500 ish dollar cpu at its launch while we purchased the 12700k for about 450 that's to say nothing of course of the cheaper kf but then again it's also to say nothing of the ddr5 memory prices and availability although you could run this with d4 worst case the two are at near parity and performance while amd remains the efficiency king the 12900k propels itself to 9.4 minutes partly thanks to the extra four cores they are still cores after all just a bit slower but it does so at the cost of a 54 increase in power consumption and a variable increase in price maybe about 22 to 44 depending on the retailer and that's compared to the 12 700 k of course the 12 900k is therefore 18 faster to render but 54 more power hungry than the 12 7. the 12 6 meanwhile allows the 12 7 a lead of 22 percent andy is winning an efficiency but intel is a fierce competitor here and it's especially strong as a price competitor price is where amd has competed with intel for years so the favor is now being returned in full this is promising that is one of the most exciting cbu cycles since the 8700k versus the 2700x so we're happy to see the competition in code compiled chromium on windows the 12700k required 57 minutes to complete the work requiring about 3 percent less time than the r9 5900x the 12900k finished 14 faster than the 127k so it is better but the value of that improvement will be contingent on its price we're not sure where the 12.9 has been selling right now launch day seems to indicate a range of 550 to 650 but uh we didn't get to see them in stock long enough to really take notice of it so either way it's 22 to 44 more expensive for 14 faster compile time and 54 more power consumption amd then remains competitive but intel is pulling ahead in raw performance or minimally again is at parity for price comparative cpus the 12700k is far more efficient than the 12 900k and is within 20 percent of the power of the 5900x and the should be worried but it's not at a total loss yet this is good to see because it'll push both companies forward adobe premiere is what interests us the most as we're considering pulling one of these cpus for an upcoming production pc build for andrew in aggregate the 12700k scored 959 points for filters render live playback and coding and effect that ranks it as behind the 5950x which leads by just 1.6 percent while costing 300 more in retail than the raw cpu price this is extremely competitive for intel which also benefits from quick sync on the non-fskew of the 12700k and to be clear for the youtube demonetization gods that's f sku not not something else the 12 900k led the 1200k by 8 hardly worth it for the power or the price the 12600k also came close to the 12700k which only held an advantage again of seven percent the 5800x gets dropped here down to 849 points or a 13 lead for the 12 700k the 5800x recently got a price drop though at some retailers so if that persists and it's wider spread than just micro center it'll be worthy once again of consideration adobe photoshop had the 12700k at 12 10 points in aggregate with the 12 900k leading by 11 the 5950x falls behind the much cheaper 12 700k as does the 5900x the 12600k is close by also again only led by 7 via the 12700k one has to wonder why intel thought launching the 11900k would be worth the reputational damage when looking at these results though it's the perfect example of sunk cost fallacy compression testing looks comparatively better for amd at least with decompression in compression though the 12700k executed 111 000 mips or millions of instructions per second versus the 5900 x's 12 higher 124k mips the 12 900k ranks similarly ahead with the 5950x holding a more meaningful lead here than before the 12700k ends up comparable to the 3900x or ahead of the 5800x by about 19 decompression shuffles the stack considerably the 12700k now falls below the 5800x despite leading in compression previously although the lead in compression is greater than the loss and decompression is the 12 900k is now 21 ahead of the 12 700k with the 5900x a staggering 48 percent ahead of the 12700k andy is particularly strong in decompression gaming benchmarks are up now hitman 3 is more memory sensitive than some of our other benchmarks making for a particularly interesting comparison for the cpus the 12700k ran at 193 fps average leading the 12 600k by four percent and being led by the 12 9 by 5 compared to amd that means the 12700k holds an 8 lead over the 5900x in average fps or 14 lead over the 5800x for lows the 12700k maintains proportional frame time pacing as reflected in one percent and 0.1 values there's nothing too exciting to look at here the low gaps between the amd cpus don't exit what we'd expect and neither part has a noteworthy advantage in that camp in cs go at 1080p which is entirely cpu bound as we'll show in our 1440p tests the 12700k ran at 332 fps average outranking the 10900k from last generation and pulling ahead of the 12 600k by 14 that means the 5600x through the 5950x all enjoy a lead over the 12 700k unique to this benchmark at least the way we conduct it andy does well here the 12900k has been retested a few times and always lands on the same spot at least it does with windows 10 not 11 as we showed before this has it about 11 percent ahead of the 12700k in windows 10 for reference and so amd is a strong competitor in this one but intel is finally beginning to claw back its gaming performance after a tough previous generation 1440p really just reaffirms previous positioning it shows us that we're not even gpu bound at 1440p and therefore certainly not at 1080p the scaling on the result stack is the same in this set of data as a result red dead 2 is sort of the antithesis of the previous benchmark as it becomes more bound up in the gpu with our test settings this means that it isn't a pure cpu benchmark but it's still useful as a representation of what happens and how scaling changes as other binds are introduced this is more realistic perhaps but it's also less useful for determining the maximum delta between cpus it is therefore imperfect and not how we'd prefer to run the testing but uh for now until we modify the test setup this is what it'll be the 12 7k and the 12 9k are about the same here as are the 11 7k and the 10900k entries the 5950x and 5900x do fall behind but not by as much as in some of the other tests due to the gpu constraint the 12600k more notably falls off as does the 5600x where the 12700k holds about a 10 lead for each plus or minus a little bit the dip in 0.1 percent lows for the 12 900k is due to bouncing off of the gpu limiter we see this in some games but more specifically we've seen it in rage games or the rockstar game engine games that's because the gpu limit screws with some of the frame time pacing a bit at least in this title and it's an observable effect we've seen elsewhere as we showed in our windows 11 versus 10 testing on alder like the biggest uplift from the os change was actually not really in raw performance it was in getting alder like functional in some applications total war was the only game we've tested so far that was buggy enough to not even launch on windows 10 with alderlake but our understanding is that microsoft and intel are addressing drm specific issues causing similar behavior regardless until we can run the 12700k on windows 11 we don't have data for it in three kingdoms as it was still unable to get past the game's menu with windows 10. this will likely be fixed but general compatibility remains the best reason so far for running windows 11 on the 12th gen tpus far cry 6 is brand new to our test suite in this one the 12700k ran at 143 fps average but had problematic lows retested on the 12900k did eventually produce better results but we've been unable to yield the same uplift on the 12 700k or 12600k proportional to the average with additional test passes as a note we do a minimum of four test passes but some of these cpus have received up to 12 for validation we'll look at frame time plotting momentarily to better understand why these dips are emerging an average fps alone the 12700k and 5900x are about equal with the 5800x not far behind about 4.4 percent ahead of the 12 700k the lowest favorite amd and older intel here however so that's something we need to look at here's a frame time plot to better understand the situation here the intel 12700k mostly runs extremely low frame times at around six to eight milliseconds which is why we saw such a high average fps occasionally we encounter spikes to 10 27 or 30 milliseconds and so on these spikes are what average into the reduced 0.1 low number that number is just an indicator for us really to trigger a deeper dive or investigation into the frame to frame metrics for a given test which is what we see here we aren't seeing any massive spikes that would be jarring stutters of say a tenth of a second but these spikes are still noticeable as slight juddering during gameplay the 5800x provides perspective as to what the line should look like it's more consistent it's flatter and it has fewer excursions from the mean which is what we want to see in cyberpunk 2077 now updated to the latest version before alder lake's launch we measured the 12700k just below the 109 and the 12900k we're gpu bound here finally thanks to cdpr updating the game to a better code base the differences on this chart are basically irrelevant once you get above the 5600x we need more cpu bound scenarios which we've presented earlier to see true scaling still this is at least useful for showing what you can expect when bound somewhere else for where the falloff point is finally in f1 2021 the intel 1200k held 326 fps average in our testing conditions when stock bumping off the same limit as the 12900k as f121 is an update to our test suite we still need to investigate whether this is a memory or a gpu bind that we're seeing for now we're assuming it's a gpu bond as a result of this there's again not much difference in this result stack like cyberpunk we'd refer you instead to our csgo and some of the other earlier results to get more valuable data for raw scaling remember this also this is a brand new test bench suite for us with all new data and we made it while moving so we'll be tweaking it over the coming month or two and removing or modifying games to establish more useful differences so at the end of all this then the 12700k continues the trend of alder like thus far which is that it's far more competitive really than anything it's launched recently we said this last review too where we're not sure if intel was trying to prime us for this review by launching incredibly impressively boring things for the last well the last generation especially 11 series but generations before that as well or if it was an accident and it just worked out that way in either case alder lake is actually very interesting the 12 series is very interesting and now finally intel's pr people will have videos from us that they can distribute internally and say look steve doesn't hate everything we make he does in fact like things when they're good and they make sense so this falls in that camp where the 12 600k the 12 900k we could find arguments for them the 12 6 is easier to argue for than the 12 9 12 9 is a good performer but it's a flagship product it costs a flagship product's price and you get fall off for as always it's a non-linear increase in the uplift in performance versus the increase and perceived value of your computer if you care about the specs listing on a forum in your signature but the 12700k typically these cpus like the 5800x the 3700x the 1100 700k the 10700k these cpus we don't normally care for out the gate typically what happens is over time as their prices fall about 50 to 100 we warm up to them and we say okay now the 10 700k makes sense because it's cheaper than it was at launch and the 1100 700k is kind of dumb uh so that's where we start to open up to it whereas initially we'll say this is just like a weird stopgap filler pointless product the same goes for the 5800x where at launch we were uninterested in it because the 5900x made far more sense for someone who is more core intensive and the 5600x you save money you could put it towards a gpu or something it was a different time back then for something that's more gaming focused but over time those cps make sense the 5800x we saw recently dropped to 300 or something on a micro center or something like that and we don't i don't really live near a micro center we don't consider them in our sort of retailer scope of pricing normally but if you can get a 5800x for 300 bucks it's far more interesting than it is at whatever it was before that the 400s and the 12700k forces sort of a price reduction on those parts because if you get the 12700k the prices we did 430 if you don't care about the igp for the kf that's a decent that's like a competitive price intel's competing on price which is not something intel typically does intel and nvidia both have a tremendous amount of hubris and it bleeds through into their pricing where neither company historically has wanted to reduce its pricing to compete with amd on price because both want to maintain this to project this image of a certain level of quality and it's worked to some extent but intel has lost that ability as it's lost confidence in the products so anyway now they're competing on price 12700k uh we can see an argument for it for sure we are going to put probably the ksc after we're done with igp testing the case scheme we bought we're probably going to put in a production machine and see how we feel about it and sort of a long-term video editing photoshop unreal engine heavy environment andrew will be using it and see how it feels in real life now for the most part benchmarks represent real life usage but sometimes we found like with the 3175x it just it doesn't quite behave the same way once you put it to use uh so we will be doing that with the 12700k we intend to do igp benchmarks as well the if you're wondering should i buy the k or the kf model the argument we would make for one over the other would simply be if you think there's value in having an igp for troubleshooting like if you don't get display out and you want to troubleshoot is it is it my video card or is it something else it's helpful to have the igp even if perhaps you won't use it beyond that and to which extents you could maybe argue also that it's wasteful or you won't get enough use to justify the cost pump uh and you're kind of gambling on it in a sense breaking and needing it anyway the igp is also useful for quick sync for lower power consumption tasks if you don't want to spin up the gpu for it assuming you're working in some kind of application that's intelligent enough to make this decision actively and several of them are then that's where we would argue for the igp but you do save a little bit of money by going for the f version and that extra 20 bucks may be more useful if you're on a really tight budget and you're trying to get the maximum you can out of it in which case extra 20 maybe helps offsets on the motherboard or the memory cost or something like that so we are not going to tell you which one to choose if you're choosing between them because it's up to your use case and that gives you enough information to make an informed decision do i really care about having troubleshooting abilities and quick sync if you do video editing you might care about quick sync and certain other types of applications out there care as well but if you're just gaming maybe go for the the f variant instead if you're buying a dedicated gpu versus amd the 5800 x we would need to see a more permanent or widespread price reduction in order to consider it price for price the 12 700 makes more sense in decompression amd has a significant technology advantage in some of the benchmarks but for the most part intel is pulling ahead here amd remains the efficiency kin right now where intel is reminding us of amd in the past it's competing on price and it's a little bit power hungry in its effort to try and compete the 1200k is incredibly power hungry it's great for heating a room but there's more to that story too and we're going to look at that in a separate video so subscribe for that hopefully this gives you a good enough set of data to work from to see if you want the 12700k and uh as always subscribe for more go to patreon.comgamersnexus for bonus videos and write-ups you can also go to store.camerasnexus.net if you'd like to grab one of our modmats or toolkits which are on backorder now or one of our wireframe desk sized mouse mats for your keyboard and mouse thank you for watching as always we'll see you all next time\n"