Alder Lake CPUs common discussion

[FireFox]

Anyone else moving to Alder Lake for their main rig?

Me been an Intel fanboy means yeah i wil
744,62€ for a CPU hurts

 

[birdie]

FWIW: just released GeekBench 5.4.3 fixes CPU frequency detection for Alder Lake CPUs.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Anyone else moving to Alder Lake for their main rig?

Tempting, but the 12900k doesn't offer enough over my 5950X to justify..... I have been contemplating a 12700k to replace my 5800X based system though once DDR5 is easier to get mostly just to play around with I'd probably still get a ridiculous 600+ usd mobo though.... I really want to see what Zen3D brings first though as I might grab a 16 core varient of it and just run two 16 core systems as my mains

 

[ViperXTR]

12th series cpus started appearing on my local distributors and as expected, early adopters tax (that's equivalent to 426.47 USD)

 

[FireFox]

12th series cpus started appearing on my local distributors and as expected, early adopters tax (that's equivalent to 426.47 USD)
View attachment 223973

Too expensive for an i5

 

[Totally]

I wonder how many people will really choose which CPU to buy based on these power consumption specs? I sure won't. I do care (a little - but not much) about power consumption at idle. But I buy based on performance and the intended purpose of the computer.

All these specs are really going to do for me is help me decide which cooler to get (if no OEM is included) and the size of my PSU.

When enthusiasts are looking to buy their new 2nd childhood, over-compensating sports car, are they really going to look at fuel economy and horsepower? Or are they going to look at fastest times and top speeds?

 

[15th Warlock]

Tempting, but the 12900k doesn't offer enough over my 5950X to justify..... I have been contemplating a 12700k to replace my 5800X based system though once DDR5 is easier to get mostly just to play around with I'd probably still get a ridiculous 600+ usd mobo though.... I really want to see what Zen3D brings first though as I might grab a 16 core varient of it and just run two 16 core systems as my mains

Yea, couldn’t agree more, no sense in replacing your 5950X with a 12900K, as far as the DDR5 situation goes, have you considered the Asus Z690 Strix D4? It’s more affordable at $349, and you can use DDR4. I’m seriously considering sending back the Asus mobo I got, and replacing it for the DDR4 version, I saw de8auer’s video, and for gaming, using DDR5 just doesn’t justify its crazy price tag.

Me been an Intel fanboy means yeah i wil
744,62€ for a CPU hurts

Whoa! Yes that hurts indeed, better to wait for the dust to settle, and prices to become more palatable, I got lucky finding my CPU at BestBuy, at $619, I think they had the lowest price for this CPU, I’ve seen them restock a couple more times since I ordered my CPU, and at one point even their local store in town had some i9s in stock yesterday, I hope Intel isn’t affected by the chip shortage, since they have their own fabs.

 

[Dristun]

Too expensive for an i5

The best price anyone's gonna get in Russia through official sources is going to be around 400USD = EUR pricing * 20% VAT. That's more or less how everyone has been setting MSRPs here for a while. Gray markets might get lower to around 350 in a few months if the availability is good.

 

[FireFox]

better to wait for the dust to settle, and prices to become more palatable,

I agree.
My current build is just 11 months old so i will be upgrading around middle of April 2022, also i saw that the Motherboard i want ( Asus Rog Maximus Z690 Hero) right now costs 700€+

 

[birdie]

Hardwareluxx ran an interesting test comparing 12900K's performance at different power targets.

Looks like 160-180W is the sweet spot for this CPU. Going above means a disproportionate increase in power consumption vs. a very dubious performance increase.

Has anyone seen an IPC comparison between Alder Lake and Tiger Lake? I can't find anything. Would be nice to know how much ADL is better than TGL if at all Should I wait for an ADL laptop or go for Black Friday discounts?

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Yea, couldn’t agree more, no sense in replacing your 5950X with a 12900K, as far as the DDR5 situation goes, have you considered the Asus Z690 Strix D4? It’s more affordable at $349, and you can use DDR4. I’m seriously considering sending back the Asus mobo I got, and replacing it for the DDR4 version, I saw de8auer’s video, and for gaming, using DDR5 just doesn’t justify its crazy price tag.

It would technically replace my 5800X regardless I would keep the 5950X as my primary or secondary computer. For me if I'm gonna do it it's got to be the Hero or higher just out of principle and half the reason I would do it is to mess around with DDR5.... I don't really care about cost I'm at a point in life where that is irrelevant.

I do think Meteorlake will be special and worth waiting for if intel can keep this momentum unlike the sub 10% ST performance gains we got from Sandybridge to Skylake... For all we knows intel could be stuck on 10nm for the next half decade like they were with Skylake on 14nm

 

[bug]

Has anyone seen an IPC comparison between Alder Lake and Tiger Lake? I can't find anything. Would be nice to know how much ADL is better than TGL if at all Should I wait for an ADL laptop or go for Black Friday discounts?

You're not likely to find a comparison like that, with Tiger Lake being a mobile part.

That said, there are some improvements in select scenarios: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1704...hybrid-performance-brings-hybrid-complexity/5

At the highest level, the P-core supports a 6-wide decode (up from 4), and has split the execution ports to allow for more operations to execute at once, enabling higher IPC and ILP from workflow that can take advantage.

Sadly, no numbers.

 

[PolRoger]

Yea, couldn’t agree more, no sense in replacing your 5950X with a 12900K, as far as the DDR5 situation goes, have you considered the Asus Z690 Strix D4? It’s more affordable at $349, and you can use DDR4. I’m seriously considering sending back the Asus mobo I got, and replacing it for the DDR4 version, I saw de8auer’s video, and for gaming, using DDR5 just doesn’t justify its crazy price tag.



Whoa! Yes that hurts indeed, better to wait for the dust to settle, and prices to become more palatable, I got lucky finding my CPU at BestBuy, at $619, I think they had the lowest price for this CPU, I’ve seen them restock a couple more times since I ordered my CPU, and at one point even their local store in town had some i9s in stock yesterday, I hope Intel isn’t affected by the chip shortage, since they have their own fabs.

My main setups are running open air bench style with custom water cooled Ryzen 59xx/39xx cpus. My last intel was back on Z170/Z270 Skylake/Kaby Lake when I did a late cycle transition to 1st gen Ryzen 1700X/X370. I'll continue to look forward to new AMD Ryzen tech but I'm not opposed to Intel either and have run plenty of Blue platforms.

Alder Lake has piqued my interest enough to give Intel's new (mainstream) platform a spin as an additional (fun/hobby) setup. My i5-12600K/Z690 (DDR4) combo is nice upgrade to my previous 6700K/7700K!

Some of the new ADL pricing is on the high side but that has always seemed to be the case with the release of new tech.

DDR5 should eventually follow the same lowering price trends as DDR4/DDR3/DDR2... However, I do find it interesting to see the rising pricing of new higher end motherboards over the last few generations? Older boards like the LGA 775 ASUS Maximus/Rampage Formula/Extreme or even the (HEDT) LGA 1366 X58 EVGA Classified and the ASUS Rampage Extreme II/III were not cheap boards back in their day but these newer higher end boards with prices pushing ~$600/700/800 even a $1000+??

 

[lexluthermiester]

Has anyone seen an IPC comparison between Alder Lake and Tiger Lake?

Steve did. He was very vocal about it.

 

[tabascosauz]

Has anyone seen any reviews / have a ADL CPU with DDR4 to test, that is able to test the limit of Gear 1 for these new boards? Seems that DDR5 might be suffering from the Gear 2 penalty to some degree so the actual difference between DDR4 and DDR5 is still unclear.

RKL was 3600/3733. Ali only stated that 3200 runs at Gear 1 because he always only runs that same 3200CL14 XMP, no mention of how high Gear 1 can go on ADL, or how it compares to RKL.

Seems kinda important, since if you're building Alder Lake with DDR4 chances are there may be a high end B-die kit lying around that you want to keep using.

 

[ir_cow]

Out of 180+fps you're concerned with an average variance of 4fps? That's margin of error kind of variance. Get over it. Sorry if I seem over-critical, but the scientist in me saw the average 4fps difference and shook his head.. The FC5 benchmark is fine and valid.

It absolutely matters for a review. I removed other variables and locked the CPU frequency to avoid large swings. I should be able to run these tests in 6 months and get the same results. If today I get 196 (which I did) and yesterday 183. Which is correct? Those who are shelling up 300+ for memory will want to know if what they are buying has any impact on games.

Has anyone seen any reviews / have a ADL CPU with DDR4 to test, that is able to test the limit of Gear 1 for these new boards? Seems that DDR5 might be suffering from the Gear 2 penalty to some degree so the actual difference between DDR4 and DDR5 is still unclear.

RKL was 3600/3733. Ali only stated that 3200 runs at Gear 1 because he always only runs that same 3200CL14 XMP, no mention of how high Gear 1 can go on ADL, or how it compares to RKL.

Seems kinda important, since if you're building Alder Lake with DDR4 chances are there may be a high end B-die kit lying around that you want to keep using.

I'm actually working on that today. Seeing how high I can go with Gear 1 for DDR4. I suspect you need to raise the VCCSA to like 1.3 V or higher just like 11th Gen.

 

[PolRoger]

I'm running now at 3600C15 (Gear 1) with E Cores disabled for a WCG/issue. I just set timings at 15-15-15-35-50 and all other timings on auto. Dram at 1.35v and VCCSA at 1.110v. With more time I'll push/test higher and tighten up secondary timings.

 

[Vader]

Is it jut me or is there something about the way Intel does things that allow their CPUs to scale frequency at the extreme ends of power scale better than AMD CPUs. You can manually push all core overclocks on AMD CPUs and power goes up but you get very little from it where as Intel CPUs yeah the power consumption becomes pretty impractical and more than a bit of a problem but you get performance that seems to scale better. Not sure if this has been discussed elsewhere but its an interesting observation.

If AMD tweaked the Zen 3 core to scale to ADL levels of power they'd be pretty much at parity?

You're on the right track. There was one overclocker that pushed an amd cpu to 5Ghz and higher using LN2 and ran some benchmarks. What he found out was that Ryzen CPUs tend to hit a bottleneck of some kind when they move far from stock clocks and subsequently performance doesn't scale well. His conclusion was that AMD set their Ryzen CPUs at the right clock speed; more speed would have had bigger effects on power consumption than performance. we'll see if they can improve on that in following generations

 

[15th Warlock]

Has anyone seen any reviews / have a ADL CPU with DDR4 to test, that is able to test the limit of Gear 1 for these new boards? Seems that DDR5 might be suffering from the Gear 2 penalty to some degree so the actual difference between DDR4 and DDR5 is still unclear.

RKL was 3600/3733. Ali only stated that 3200 runs at Gear 1 because he always only runs that same 3200CL14 XMP, no mention of how high Gear 1 can go on ADL, or how it compares to RKL.

Seems kinda important, since if you're building Alder Lake with DDR4 chances are there may be a high end B-die kit lying around that you want to keep using.

Der8auer has a good good video comparing DDR5 to DDR4, and so does kit guru, you can find them on YouTube.

So I also ordered the Asus Z690 Strix-A D4, it'll get here tomorrow, no chance in hell I'll find DDR5 before that, I'll test my ADL with my DDR4 3600CL16 kit before I get a chance to test it with the Atrix-F mobo. Both boards are pretty much the same, down to the power delivery system.

I might end up sticking to DDR4 until DDR5 goes through its growing pains, for gaming, it'll have minimal effect.

Once DDR5 hits mainstream we'll see 6000MHz kits and higher become mainstream, as it is now, you cant even buy a platry 4800MHz kit...

 

[PolRoger]

Running/testing 3733C16 Gear 1... Manually set 16-16-16-36-52 with the rest of the timings on auto. DRAM @1.35v and VCCSA @1.120v showing just a quick AIDA64 memory stress.

 

[GerKNG]

not far away from a 5900x

 

[phanbuey]

Running/testing 3733C16 Gear 1... Manually set 16-16-16-36-52 with the rest of the timings on auto. DRAM @1.35v and VCCSA @1.120v showing just a quick AIDA64 memory stress.

View attachment 224023

Holy sh*t... my chip is coming on Monday.... I hope it can hit that in gear 1. Super helpful.

Aida memory stress sucks - use Karhu Ram Test or Testmem 5

 

[GerKNG]

btw:
Intel seem to have released the first intel management engine software for Z690 (it appeared today on my support site for my motherboard)
it fixed the one "no driver found" device in my device manager and i can finally play AC Valhalla for some reason (didn't launched before)

 

[mstenholm]

not far away from a 5900x
View attachment 224071

I’m sure there will come a 12600K OC thread sooner or later.

 

[15th Warlock]

Just got my CPU tonight, guess BestBuy shipped it from a distribution center only 10 miles away from my small, middle of nowhere town


Super stoked to try it!