Core i7-12800HX vs. Ryzen 9 6900HX benchmarks show Intel ahead of the game but at a huge cost to your power bill

The Intel 12th gen Alder Lake and AMD Zen 3+ platforms are now out in the wild to replace laptops running on older 11th gen Tiger Lake and Zen 3 CPUs, respectively. While the Zen 3+ series is looking like it offers just modest improvements over Zen 3 thus far, the Intel 12th gen series is more of the monster upgrade that many performance hunters may be after.

Our benchmarks below compare the MSI GE67 with the Core i7-12800HX to the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 with the Ryzen 9 6900HX. Right off the bat, we can see that the raw multi-thread performance potential of the Intel CPU is much faster at 50 to 60 percent over the AMD CPU due to its higher core and thread count. The performance advantage is present in single-thread applications as well albeit by a smaller 15 percent margin.

The catch is that performance-per-watt hasn't improved by all that much between the 11th gen Tiger Lake and 12th gen Alder Lake families. Thus, while Alder Lake can offer faster performance than the previous generation, it comes at the cost of higher power draw. Running Prime95 on our MSI test unit would consume about 165 W compared to 130 W on the Asus for a 27 percent uptick in overall power draw. Looking more closely at only the CPU package power draw of each laptop shows the Core i7-12800HX stabilizing at 110 W vs. 80 W on the Ryzen 9 6900HX.

The higher power consumption of the Intel-powered MSI aligns with our general observations of laptops running on Alder Lake chipsets including the Alder Lake-U and P series. The year-over-year performance upgrade is definitely there for most SKUs, but expect to see some larger AC adapters shipping with some laptop models in order to better accommodate the more demanding Intel CPUs.