Leak reveals first relevant Intel Alder Lake-S benchmarks and alleged launch prices

Persian PC outlet Sakhtafzarmag is popping out of nowhere with the first extensive benchmarks for the upcoming Alder Lake desktop processors from Intel. Now, these CPUs are supposed to launch in late October or early November, so there is still a possibility that the outlet actually benchmarked some qualification samples. However, it is highly unlikely that the remaining time will bring any major improvements for the final products. Unless the new Windows 11 CPU scheduler optimized for Alder Lake is indeed a game changer. Then there is the DDR5 support that will definitely tip the scales in Intel’s favor. Sakhtafzarmag also throws in some retail prices that look quite enticing compared to AMD’s current offer.

This is the first time we see Alder Lake benchmarks beyond the usual Geekbench and Cinebench leaks. Granted, there are no gaming tests involved, but the video encoding, Blender rendering and PC Mark benchmarks are still relevant for content creation assessment. Additinally, the models tested here are the KF variants that do not come with integrated graphics, yet that should not impact the test results in any way.

Cinebench R23 is first up, and there is not much of a surprise here. All the Alder Lake models beat the AMD competition by a considerable margin in single core tests. Intel is taking back its crown, but this is not really a huge win for desktop processors nowadays. It probably is relevant for mobile processors, though. In any case, the multi-core tests don’t look that impressive anymore. The i9-12900KF is on par with the R9 5950X, while the i7-12700KF is slightly faster than the R9 5900X, and the i5-12600KF is indeed faster than the R7 5800X, as revealed by MLID.

On to some relevant benchmarks now. For CPU video encoding, the new Alder Lake processors appear to be superior in the X264 FHD tests, but are mostly on par with the AMD counterparts when it comes to X265 HD tests, and the situation is reversed with the HWBOT X265 tests, where AMD’s processors are dominating. In Blender, the Alder Lake processors seem very slightly slower than the AMD competition. We do note that the i5-12600KF is neck in neck with the R7 5800X still. PC Mark is where the Alder Lake models fail to impress, as they appear to be slower than even the current Rocket Lake family. From these last tests alone we can safely assume that the processors were benchmarked in Windows 10 with DDR4 RAM. As we can see, Intel is not really destroying the AMD competition with Alder Lake, so Team Red might get the upper hand again with the V-Cache Ryzen 5000 models in early 2022.

As far as prices go, the Alder Lake products seem to lure us with better value propositions. If the prices provided by Sakhtafzarmag are indeed accurate, then we are looking at a price difference of ~$150 between the i9-12900K and the R9 5950X, while the i7-12700K would be ~$180 cheaper compared to the R9 5900X, and the i5-12600K would cost ~$120 less than the R7 5800X. We are not exactly sure why the outlet is providing prices for the K models instead of the KF ones, which should be even lower.

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