Alleged Intel i9-12900K coupled with DDR5-5200 RAM beats the R9 5950X by a few thousand points in latest leaked Cinebench R23 multi-core test

A new leak showing Cinebench R23 results for the i9-12900K Alder Lake processor from Intel has been shared via Twitter by hv_reveal. This time, the Alder Lake flagship managed to score 30,549 points in the multi-core test, which is considerably higher than what we saw with the benchmarks leaked 2 weeks ago. Back then, the supposed CB R23 multi-core charts were showing the i9-12900K and the R9 5950X neck and neck at around 26,000 points, which already looked a bit suspicious, since the AMD chip is known to average at least 28,000. The latest leaked pictures try to hide the CPU name, but we can safely presume it is the i9-12900K since that is the only Alder Lake-S model with 8 big cores and 8 little cores as identified by CPU-Z.

A comment posted in response to Videocardz’s article reporting on this new leak points out that the R9 5950X can easily be tweaked and overclocked to score above 31,000 points. However, the Alder Lake-S chip does not appear to be overclocked as it is shown to be running at its default 5.3 GHz boost. Of course, this maximum boost is only reserved for up to 2 cores via the Thermal Velocity Boost tech, so the multi-corte tests are most likely performed at a maximum speed of around 5 GHz, which is still higher than the R9 5950X one that usually cannot boost over 4.73 GHz on all cores.

Nevertheless, the Alder Lake has fewer big cores to work with and even fewer threads compared to the R9 5950X, yet we see it beating the AMD model by a few thousand points in Cinebench R23 without any overclocking. The key to this performance could be the usage of DDR5 memory.

As reported in the CPU-Z screenshots included with the latest leak, the test system appears to integrate a Gigabyte AORUS Z690 Ultra motherboard with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support. The memory tab in CPU-Z also shows that the RAM kit is rated as DDR5-5200 with quad-channel support (2x 32-bit memory channels per module). Since these specs exceed the supported DDR5-4800 ones, the RAM is probably overclocked via the new Gear 4 option on the memory controller that is rumored to introduce high latency, which might not be too appealing to gamers.

Additionally, the CPU voltage appears to be off, but that is a known issue with CPU-Z, plus the tests were performed on Windows 10, which does not support the new CPU scheduler for Alder Lake. We should be seeing higher scores on Windows 11.

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