New Core i9 12900HK Benchmarks – Faster than the Threadripper 1950X

Romanian media Lab501 Has managed to achieve a next-generation notebook with the Alder Lake chip and has released new benchmarks for the flagship Core i9 12900HK processor.

Although Intel introduced the Alder Lake H family at CES 2022 last week, the first laptops in this series will not be available until late January or even February. However, manufacturers have provided samples to influencers and critics, who are only allowed to share basic information.

The Lab501 has a pre-production device with the next generation chip and an open factor of 12900HK Core i9, which is the only overclockable example of the Alder Lake H. For this reason, the same processor was used in Intel’s official benchmarks.

New benchmarks of the flagship Core i9 12900HK processor

The Core i9 12900HK has 14 cores, 6 of which are powerful and 8 of which are low power. Officially, this model has a boost frequency of 5.0 GHz and a base heat power of 45 watts. The new Intel chip claims to be up to 28 percent faster in gaming than the Core i9 11900HK with Tiger Lake architecture.

Although these media do not call their test a review and want to preview it, we are probably witnessing the first professional and independent test of a DDR5 laptop. The tested device uses 32 GB of DDR5 4800 CL40 memory and two PCIe storage memories in RAID 0 mode. Undoubtedly, we see a high-end model, but unfortunately, this site does not mention the exact model.

Interestingly, they did not have access to the graphics drivers for the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. This means that they were not able to publish a full review and we have to wait for the drivers.

The new giant blue processor has the highest rating in all synthetic tests, and we see 15% better performance in Cinebench and 8% better performance in PCMark 8. Lab501 has found that the Core i9 12900HK is even faster than the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X on the Cinebench R20, which is a 180-watt model for the HEDT platform.

It has also been confirmed that the boost frequency of the twelfth generation mobile flagship in the tests is 4.988 GHz, while it consumes 113 watts of power and records a temperature of 99 degrees Celsius.

We are not yet witnessing a revelation of the performance of the AMD Ryzen 9 6980HX with a 6nm Zen 3+ architecture. Just like the Intel processor, the Red Team model has an open coefficient and has a maximum boost frequency of 5.0 GHz. However, it has fewer cores (8 vs. 14), although they are all powerful and large.

There is reason why a separate graphics test (which of course is not covered in this review) with Alder Lake processors can be interesting. Alder Lake P silicon has a more limited number of PCIe lines for graphics (8 for graphics, 16 in total). On paper, this may affect graphic performance, and it is an issue that critics can address in their reviews. In the previous generation Tiger Lake we saw 20 lines in total and 16 lines for graphics.