The Core i5-12600 is an interesting product from Intel. At $240, this 6-core/12-thread processor is the fastest "traditional" multi-core processor from the 12th Gen Core Alder Lake family. Everything priced higher comes with Intel Hybrid technology and at least four efficiency cores (or E-cores). You get six high-IPC Golden Cove P-cores with 4.80 GHz maximum Turbo frequencies, 18 MB of L3 cache, and all of the new-generation I/O this series brings, including DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen 5. The i5-12600 is essentially a higher-clocked sibling of the exciting i5-12400 in this sense, and has more in common with that $180 chip than with the Core i5-12600K. For $30 more, not only do you get an unlocked multiplier and slightly higher clock speeds with the i5-12600K, but also those four E-cores and 2 MB of extra shared cache. If you don't need the integrated graphics, you can choose the i5-12600KF, save another $10, and keep all of that CPU muscle.

So, does the i5-12600 have anything going for it? Surprisingly, it does. Overall, it ends up a little over 3% faster than the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, about 4.5% faster than the previous-generation Core i5-11600K (higher clocks and power limits), and an impressive 20% faster than the i5-10600K, which came with the old Skylake cores. This is where the IPC of the Golden Cove cores does the heavy lifting. In fact, it is overall 4% faster than the i7-10700K—an 8-core/16-thread processor—which means the IPC uplift is overcoming the core-count deficit. The 10-core/20-thread i9-10900K is all of 7% faster, and the i7-11700K 8-core processor is over 9% faster. The Ryzen 7 5800X is over 16% faster.

Special attention needs to be paid to just how big of a performance gap there is between the i5-12600 and i5-12600K/KF (we reviewed the i5-12600K). At stock speeds, the i5-12600K is a significant 12% faster and ends up matching the previous-generation flagship i9-11900K. It's also just 3.5% behind the Ryzen 7 5800X. This is because besides the six P-cores, you're getting four E-cores, and these tiny little cores are making tangible contributions to the chip's multi-threaded productivity performance numbers, especially when Intel Thread Director does its job and a benchmark is able to properly utilize the E-cores. Interestingly, this 12% performance uplift comes with exactly a 12% price premium, so performance/dollar is nearly the same in productivity apps at least. Our graph shows the i5-12600K offering 3.5% lower performance/dollar, which is due to performance averages being dragged behind by applications and games that aren't optimized for E-cores.

In the academically-relevant 720p gaming resolution, the i5-12600 ends up beating the last-generation flagship i9-11900K and nearly matching the Ryzen 7 5800X. The six-core Alder Lake has its moments in games such as Battlefield V, Borderlands 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and Metro Exodus, where it ends up beating all other AMD chips. This is mainly because these games seem to find 12 threads sufficient. Gaming begins at 1080p, and we see the i5-12600 perform within a hair's breadth of the i5-12600K here. The biggest performance gap with this chip is to the i7-12700K, which ends up a whopping 16% faster in CS:GO. The Ryzen 5 5600X is about 2.5 to 3% slower across the board, while the 16-thread 5800X is barely 1% faster.

1440p sees our RTX 3080 begin to break a sweat. This is also the resolution most 4K + DLSS/FSR configurations render at. Both averaged and on a case-by-case basis, the i5-12600 performs between 1 to 3% behind the i5-12600K, and within 1% of the 5800X, while being consistently 1% ahead of the 5600X. At 4K Ultra HD, our RTX 3080 has its hands full as every test is GPU bound. This reflects the reality of the graphics card market, and we doubt that replacing the RTX 3080 with an RTX 3090 would make any difference here; only the next-generation of GPUs can perhaps change the picture.

The Core i5-12600 comes with much tighter power limits out of the box than the i5-12600K. It in fact has the same ones as the i5-12400. The processor base power (PBP) is set at 65 W, and the maximum turbo power (MTP) at 117 W, both of which are lower than the 125 W PBP and 150 W MTP of the i5-12600K. We had a hunch that the i5-12600 is being held back by tighter power limits than what it can handle, so we removed them. The i5-12600 with its power limits removed ends up a noteworthy 5.3% faster in productivity tests, and more in heavy multi-core workloads like rendering. which puts it within 1% of the 10-core i9-10900K. This is a free 1% performance boost across the board even in games.

If you've checked out the overclocking section of this review, you've seen our pretty nice 4.9 GHz all-core overclock. But isn't the Core i5-12600 locked? Indeed, it is. Multiplier-based overclocking isn't available, but given the right motherboard, you can overclock all Alder Lake CPUs. The secret sauce is Alder Lake's integrated clock generator. Traditionally, the CPU's base clock (BCLK) was generated on the motherboard and fed to the processor. In order to reduce motherboard design cost and complexity, Intel included an internal clock generator with Tiger Lake and added that capability to Alder Lake, too. For some reason, Intel decided you should still be able to feed an external BCLK signal to the processor—in their press briefings, they vaguely mentioned this was for enthusiast overclockers. ASUS has included such a clock generator on their higher-end Z690 motherboards, like the Z690 Hero used in our testing. From here on out, it's fairly easy to overclock the i5-12600, and the results speak for themselves. It's still more of an academic curiosity at this stage because it won't be easy to justify the increased cost of the motherboard, especially when the significantly more powerful Core i5-12600K or KF are not that much more expensive. Given the press this newfound OC capability has been receiving lately, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a B660 motherboard with external clockgen soon; that is, unless Intel decides to block this kind of overclocking.

In conclusion, should you buy the Core i5-12600? It is a decent product for the performance on offer, with more than acceptable levels of efficiency. However, it could have been priced a little better. At $240, it's just $20 behind the i5-12600KF and $30 behind the i5-12600K, which offer a double-digit performance uplift. An argument can be made for the fact that while the i5-12600 includes a cooler, the i5-12600K or KF don't, so both cost at least another $20-30. But if you have the cooling question sorted, the i5-12600 does end up uncomfortably priced. Had Intel priced it at $220 or below, performance per dollar would have perhaps tilted in its favor compared to the i5-12600K, making it a lot more recommendable. You also have to consider that the i5-12400/F is just 4% slower, but a whopping $60-80 cheaper. That sort of a price difference buys you 32 GB memory in place of 16 GB, or a 2 TB SSD in place of 1 TB, if you're willing to live with that 4% performance loss. AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X is slower and more expensive. AMD recently confirmed that they are adding support for Zen 3 processors to their 300-series chipsets, which means you could grab a $40 A320 board and run Ryzen 5 5600X on it, which could push the value-equation enough to favor the AMD processor. AMD also just announced that a new Ryzen 5 5600 non-X is coming—we have to wait for reviews to figure out whether that $200 option can offer better value than the Core i5-12600, Ryzen 5 5600X, or Core i5-12400F.