Besides this processor review, we have more content for you today: Core i9-12900K, Core i7-12700K, Core i5-12600K, ASUS ROG Maximum Z690 Hero, and Intel Z690 Motherboard Comparison.

The Core i5-12600K is an important product for Intel as it lets gamers pick a processor around the $300-mark that can play any of today's and tomorrow's games at maxed out settings and 4K resolution with FPS rates higher than anything offered by AMD. Games love IPC, and the six "Golden Cove" P-cores provide all the brains a modern AAA game could ever ask for. Even non-gaming performance makes the i5-12600K an amazing proposition for today's productivity tasks.

Intel has indeed beaten AMD "Zen 3" at gaming, and it shows in our tests. In the academically important 720p resolution that highlights CPU-level bottlenecks, the i5-12600K beats even the top Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X parts despite a much lower core-count. This is because the 12 threads from the P-cores provide sufficient performance and parallelism for games. There are games in which the "Gracemont" E-cores actually contribute to performance, and those in which disabling them slightly improves thread placement.

Gaming begins at 1080p, which shows the i5-12600K beating all Ryzen 5000 series parts. The i7-12700K and i9-12900K are faster by a single-digit percentage, but this has more to do with their higher clock speeds on the P-cores than their higher core count. 1440p is where things begin to heat up, and our GeForce RTX 3080 begins to be tested. The i5-12600K ends up at least 6% faster than the Ryzen 5 5600X, and faster than all the other Ryzens. Its bigger siblings are only marginally faster, so if you only want to game with Alder Lake, the 12600K should be your weapon of choice.

At 4K UHD, the performance bottleneck is squarely in the hands of the RTX 3080, and the performance gaps begin to slim. The 720p results are telling in that they highlight what this processor can do in a crunch situation where it's paired with a fast next-gen graphics card. You're likely going to hold on to this processor for at least 3–4 years, and may upgrade your graphics card. In such a case, having the i5-12600K, which is about 9% faster than the 5600X, may help. As we mentioned earlier, disabling E-cores doesn't always hurt or help. There are games, such as Civilization VI, where disabling E-cores comes with a noticeable performance hit. On the other hand, games such as Doom Eternal which actually benefit from disabling them.

With rendering tests, the i5-12600K—technically a 10-core/16-thread processor—is able to edge past the Ryzen 7 5800X 8-core/16-thread chip, as tests like Cinebench R23 are able to utilize all cores well. With web-browsing tests, the i5-12600K is staying ahead on account of browsers being served P-core performance, and web-rendering remains a less-parallelized workload.

Much of our Office and Productivity test suite sees the i5-12600K, along with other Alder Lake chips, comfortable ahead of the competition. These remain less-parallelized tasks that benefit from high IPC, and Thread Director is correctly getting the P-cores to crush them. Compression is another best-case for Alder Lake chips in general—a highly scalable workload that isn't too demanding on the ISA, both types of cores are able to chip in, heaving the i5-12600K over most 8-core chips from the previous generation. Media encoding is friendly with this architecture, too, as it's a highly scalable workload in the case of videos. All cores are chipping in, which puts the i5-12600K ahead of the Ryzen 7 5800X.

We did use Windows 11 for all our testing, which has proper support for the big.LITTLE architecture of Alder Lake and includes the AMD L3 cache fix, too. Intel allocated extra silicon estate for "Thread Director," an AI-powered network in the CPU that's optimized to tell the OS where to place threads. That said, several of our tests still showed very low performance. While wPrime as an old synthetic benchmark might not be a big deal, I'm puzzled by the highly popular MySQL database server not getting placed into the P-cores. Maybe the logic is "but it's a server background process"? In that case, that logic is flawed. If a process is bottlenecked by around half (!) and the only process on the machine using a vast majority of processor resources, doesn't it deserve to go onto the high-performance cores instead? I would say so. Higher performance would not only achieve higher throughput, and faster answers to user requests, but would also reduce power consumption because queries would be completed much faster. Other reviewers I've talked to have seen similar (few) placement issues with other software, so it seems Intel and Microsoft still have work to do. On the other hand, for gaming, Thread Director works pretty much perfectly. We didn't have time to test Alder Lake on Windows 10 yet, but that article is coming next week.

Unlike my 11th Gen Rocket Lake experience, where I felt the platform was full of bugs and rushed, I had zero issues with Alder Lake. The BIOS of my ASUS motherboard feels stable and feature-complete; DDR5 memory just worked, click XMP and you're done. I also didn't encounter any crashes or unexpected issues while testing in Windows 11; like for many, my biggest issue is still with the Start Menu and other UI annoyances.

Overall, the Core i5-12600K spells big trouble for AMD as it renders the Ryzen 7 5800X a hard chip to sell. The sheer IPC uplift and the E-cores are able to more than make up for the P-core deficit compared to 8-core "Zen 3" chips. Games love IPC, and six P-cores remain plenty for them. There are certain games that are able to put the E-cores to work. There's tremendous potential in the Hybrid architecture for games, where developers can utilize the E-cores for lightweight tasks, such as audio mixing, the rendering stack, and other peripheral tasks, while letting the P-cores deal with the game's other heavyweight operations. With a price under $300, the i5-12600K actually undercuts the Ryzen 7 5800X in a big way and basically matches the Ryzen 5 5600X, with higher performance to boot. But platform costs are a problem. Right now, you can only pair these chips with Z690 motherboards, and those are not cheap (start around $170, and the decent ones are easily close to $300). DDR5 memory is at least 50% pricier than DDR4, but Intel covered this problem by ensuring backwards compatibility with DDR4. The Core i5-12600K is all the processor you'll ever need for a contemporary gaming PC build.