“Stupid product – better buy a system based on the Core i7-12700KF.” Extreme Core i9-12900KS review shows what the processor is capable of

The Intel Core i9-12900KS processor is already on sale, and its reviews have appeared on the Web. That is, we have the opportunity to understand what happened with Intel this time.

To begin with, we recall that the Core i9-12900KS is actually an overclocked Core i9-12900K. And in general, we are interested in two questions: how justified is the overpayment of $ 150 and how hot the CPU turned out, given that the usual Intel flagship turned out to be incredibly voracious.

So, as you can see from numerous benchmarks, the Core i9-12900KS is definitely faster than the Core i9-12900K. But often not much. On average, it is worth talking about a 4-6% performance increase in applications for a 25% price increase. In games, sometimes there is no difference at all, although sometimes it is noticeable. However, in absolute terms, the growth still does not make sense. That is, the novelty looks completely unprofitable.

As for the comparison with the Ryzen 9 5950X, the situation is about the same as when comparing this CPU with the Core i9-12900K. That is, there are applications where the AMD flagship is faster and noticeable, and there is software where the Intel CPU looks much better.

The Core i9-12900KS is expected to consume even more power and get even hotter than the Core i9-12900K. The novelty requires 20-70 W more power, and even the MSI CoreLiquid S360 AIO liquid system could not cool the CPU normally – in Cinebench R23, the temperature reached 102 degrees. True, what is interesting, while the processor worked at a frequency of 5 GHz for all cores for almost an hour, that is, such a temperature regime did not lead to throttling.

As a result, the authors of the review called the Core i9-12900KS a stupid product, suggesting that it was for this reason that Intel itself did not send out such CPUs for reviews to thematic resources. As the best option, they advise a system based on the Core i7-12700KF, which will cost about the price of one Core i9-12900KS.