Alder Lake: Overclocked Intel Core i9-12900K sets new benchmark records at 6.8 GHz

Just hours after Intel has officially unveiled the 12th generation of its highly anticipated desktop CPUs, a tinkerer has already put the new Alder Lake flagship processor Core i9-12900K through its paces and was able to set new performance records with an extreme cooling solution and aggressive overclocking. According to an article by Tom's Hardware, Allen "Splave" Golibersuch managed to overclock the Golden Cove performance cores of the i9-12900K to a spectacular 6.8 GHz, while the clock frequency of the more efficient Gracemont cores was increased to 5.3 GHz.

Splave utilized a particular version of the ASRock Z690 motherboard, a 1600W EVGA SuperNova PSU and overclocked DDR5 memory. The article does not contain any info regarding the temperatures and power consumption during this benchmark, but it seems likely that this is more of an experimental build. In Geekbench 4, this configuration achieved a single-core score of 11,669 points, while Geekbench 5 measured an impressive 2,740 points for the Core i9-12900K's single-core performance.

The previous single-core record set by the Intel Core i9-11900K (from US$544 on Amazon) was therefore improved by 19%, but the multi-core benchmark results were even better. In the Geekbench 4 and Geekbench 5 multi-core benchmarks, the Intel Core i9-12900K scored 93,232 and 26,649 points respectively. That is 27% better than the previous record-holding CPU with 16 cores, which was the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. It will be exciting to see whether AMD's upcoming Ryzen CPUs will be able match or even surpass the formidable overclocking performance of the new Intel Core i9-12900K.