Intel Core i9-12900KF tops both PassMark and UserBenchmark as Alder Lake chips dominate the controversial benchmarks

The Intel Core i9-12900KF chip, which comes without the burden of an iGPU, has found itself topping both the PassMark CPU Mark chart for desktop CPUs and the UserBenchmark chart for average bench. The former benchmark had been headed by Apple Silicon for many months before Alder Lake’s release, with the Intel Core i9-12900K finally ending M1-related dominance at the top. Now that Intel processor has been replaced by its “F” variant and there are also new appearances for the i7-12700K and i7-12700KF at the top end of the single-thread performance chart. All five of the leading Alder Lake chips manage scores that break the 4,000-point barrier.

Over at UserBenchmark there is an even better picture painted for Alder Lake, which will come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the benchmark. However, our last report detailed how three “K” processors had tentatively grabbed the top spots based on very few samples. Now the Intel Core i9-12900KF leads with an average bench of 120%, while hundreds of i9-12900K, i7-12700K, and i5-12600K samples have apparently been tested to cement their lofty positions. They are joined in the top six places by the Intel Core i7-12700KF and the Intel Core i5-12600KF.

Alder Lake appears to have been a positive release for Intel, which was needed considering how much ground Team Blue has given up to AMD since the rise of Zen microarchitecture. However, UserBenchmark is notoriously Ryzen-unfriendly, with the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X down in 16th place as the best performer on this site from Team Red. PassMark has also had issues with Ryzen processors when they were practically wiped out from its charts in 2020 after the version 10 update was introduced. AMD will not pull any punches with its Zen 4 desktop parts (“Raphael”), so it will be fascinating to see how these two benchmarks process the ensuing results for Ryzen 7000.

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