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Intel Core i5-12600

W1zzard

W1zzard

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The Intel Core i5-12600 doesn't have any E-cores, which makes it a fundamentally different processor than the Core i5-12600K, and thus very different than the naming would suggest. The Core i5-12600 is actually the fastest non-hybrid Alder Lake processor you can buy, but should you?

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wow, 4% uplift from the 12400, thats quite a lot
the price tag tho, and the lack of the 12600F sku monkaS
 
12400f under 200eur is the one for a modest gaming PC. Until 5600 non x comes, will see.
 
Beautiful review, the only thing missing is the zen 1700 CPU for comparison (kind of like how the RX570/580 that made a come back for gpu reviews) ;)
 
What settings were used for the cyberpunk 2077 benchmarks? They seem anomalous.
 
Does the iGPU portion of these Alder Lake chips support DSC? Passing the display output alone with duplicate displays option to the iGPU and letting that output it to my display would be a nice perk if could use that as a way to get DSC out the render from the iGPU compressing it to the output from the render fed to the iGPU by my discrete GPU that lacks DSC. The display itself is DP1.4 HBR3 capable however. It would make a good way to salvage it's usefulness on the iGPU.
 
Not "To E, or not to E?" ;)

Great review as always. :)
 
if they had a 12600f non-k for like $220, I would buy it instantly. fuck e-cores. oc'ing doesn't interest me. but on same hand i don't want something like the 12700f, which is like a base clock of 2.1 ghz... i don't know how well that boost in older games... so really my only option i guess is 12600kf since i am doing a budget build... and maybe the MSI Pro B660m for $140... and some cheap ddr4 3200 ram. combine that with my 6700 xt... and away I go...

I mean Intel is getting 20-30 fps gains in some games at 1080p which is what I intend to game at. so that is important to me... I doubt the 5800x 3d cache really changes the game all that much.
 
CallandorWoT said:
if they had a 12600f non-k for like $220, I would buy it instantly. fuck e-cores. oc'ing doesn't interest me. but on same hand i don't want something like the 12700f, which is like a base clock of 2.1 ghz... i don't know how well that boost in older games... so really my only option i guess is 12600kf since i am doing a budget build... and maybe the MSI Pro B660m for $140... and some cheap ddr4 3200 ram. combine that with my 6700 xt... and away I go...

I mean Intel is getting 20-30 fps gains in some games at 1080p which is what I intend to game at. so that is important to me... I doubt the 5800x 3d cache really changes the game all that much.
Click to expand...

Just grab a 5600x for $199 and any b550 board.

www.newegg.com

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You've got another hour and 40 minutes until the sale's over.
 
Theres been a lot of nice offers for 12500 in Denmark, theres some time cheaper than the 12400
 
Initiial pricing is I think too close to 12600k range. I believe it will go down to 220 ish in a short while. Then it would make sense.
 
However much hate for E cores, the 12700k was best in almost every graph, guess which chip i bought. No regrets.

Either run with the E cores enabled or disabled imo still good either way as this review shows.
 
Tigger said:
However much hate for E cores, the 12700k was best in almost every graph, guess which chip i bought. No regrets.

Either run with the E cores enabled or disabled imo still good either way as this review shows.
Click to expand...
Yeah the data here conclusively shows that you do want the E-Cores, especially if it's only a few dollars extra
 
W1zzard said:
Yeah the data here conclusively shows that you do want the E-Cores, especially if it's only a few dollars extra
Click to expand...
It depends, really. My E cores are disabled because I'm running Win10 and Linux will only support the new architecture starting with 5.18. Even then, it remains to be seen how well it can handle priorities.

But I get what you're saying: you do want the E-cores, because they bring crunching power, they're not anemic. At the same time, just look at 12600k in your own wPrime benchmark to see what happens when the workload lands on the wrong core.
 
Why does the PL-removed 12600 use more power than the overclocked 12600?

Also like:

* 12400 no PL = 4.4 GHz = 101.4
* 12600 no PL = 4.8 GHz (+9.1%) = 105.3/95.3/1.014 = +9.0%
* 12600 OC = 5.0 GHz (+4.2%) = 112.7 / 105.3 = +7.0%.

So why does the 9.1% extra MHz give 9.0% more performance but the 4.2% extra MHz give 7.0%?

Is there some difference between 5.0GHz 'OC' and 5.0 GHz 'pl disabled'?

Also it would be nice to see something about the dual encoding engines in the UHD 770, don't think anyone has tested the impact of those.
 
It is just me or does this SKU feel a bit ... redundant? I mean, sure, it outperforms the 12400 ... barely. I know Intel are the absolute masters of incremental product segmentation, and I guess the answer to the question of "why does this SKU exist?" is "it's $30 more than a 12400 yet costs the same to produce", but ... well, I guess it makes sense when you're operating on the scale of Intel. Still seems unnecessary to me.


Quite interesting to see just how much faster the 12600K manages to be though. A mostly irrelevant difference in gaming, but definitely there in productivity. Those E cores definitely help in heavily threaded tasks that can make use of them (or for keeping lightweight background tasks out of the way of higher performance ones).
 
thelawnet said:
Why does the PL-removed 12600 use more power than the overclocked 12600?
Click to expand...
I think my manual OC voltage is lower than what the CPU runs at default
 
Valantar said:
It is just me or does this SKU feel a bit ... redundant? I mean, sure, it outperforms the 12400 ... barely. I know Intel are the absolute masters of incremental product segmentation, and I guess the answer to the question of "why does this SKU exist?" is "it's $30 more than a 12400 yet costs the same to produce", but ... well, I guess it makes sense when you're operating on the scale of Intel. Still seems unnecessary to me.


Quite interesting to see just how much faster the 12600K manages to be though. A mostly irrelevant difference in gaming, but definitely there in productivity. Those E cores definitely help in heavily threaded tasks that can make use of them (or for keeping lightweight background tasks out of the way of higher performance ones).
Click to expand...
But... but... E-CORES ARE A HACK AND INTEL IS STEALING FROM US

(or whatever nonsense the AMD fanbois in this forum use to justify hating E-cores).
 
Assimilator said:
But... but... E-CORES ARE A HACK AND INTEL IS STEALING FROM US

(or whatever nonsense the AMD fanbois in this forum use to justify hating E-cores).
Click to expand...
Lol, I haven't seen to many of those opinions luckily, but then I haven't been spending as much time on the forums recently. Me, I'm looking forward to seeing how e-cores add up for mobile, particularly in those 2P+nE chips. Hybrid CPUs of various kinds are likely the way of the future, so while ADL is definitely imperfect, it still does a lot of things right.
 
Assimilator said:
But... but... E-CORES ARE A HACK AND INTEL IS STEALING FROM US

(or whatever nonsense the AMD fanbois in this forum use to justify hating E-cores).
Click to expand...
It's more like Intel high refresh crowd. The AMD fan's embraced Ryzen and multi-core long before E-cores even arrived.

Valantar said:
Lol, I haven't seen to many of those opinions luckily, but then I haven't been spending as much time on the forums recently. Me, I'm looking forward to seeing how e-cores add up for mobile, particularly in those 2P+nE chips. Hybrid CPUs of various kinds are likely the way of the future, so while ADL is definitely imperfect, it still does a lot of things right.
Click to expand...
I agree that hybrid chips will certainly be ironed out and more integrated into designs moving forward. The harder and more complicated node shrinks become the more work around solutions will make sense. The low hanging fruit are disappearing. I think what needs to happen next with this type of big/LITTLE chiplet approach from either AMD/Intel is just using and assigning one chipet or the other to be treated by the OS itself as a foreground or background chiplet like with processor scheduling for CPU time slices. Combining TSV with 3D Stacked Cache for the L2/L3 cache between two chiplets different core count sizes could be interesting too.

Having separate BCLK clocks for each chiplet would be a nice step too. It would enable different memory frequencies for each and in turn that could lead to efficiency gains. It could enable the potential use a different SPD/JEDEC timing profile and memory clock frequency for each chiplet. That's pretty cool given they can vary in terms of frequency, timings, and voltages so it would lead to better heat and efficiency management between chiplets.
 
Last edited:
Valantar said:
It is just me or does this SKU feel a bit ... redundant? I mean, sure, it outperforms the 12400 ... barely. I know Intel are the absolute masters of incremental product segmentation, and I guess the answer to the question of "why does this SKU exist?" is "it's $30 more than a 12400 yet costs the same to produce", but ... well, I guess it makes sense when you're operating on the scale of Intel. Still seems unnecessary to me.


Quite interesting to see just how much faster the 12600K manages to be though. A mostly irrelevant difference in gaming, but definitely there in productivity. Those E cores definitely help in heavily threaded tasks that can make use of them (or for keeping lightweight background tasks out of the way of higher performance ones).
Click to expand...

It's surely less redundant than the 10600, which differed ONLY from the 10600K in being 4.8 GHz locked, rather than 4.8 GHz unlocked.

Here the SKUs are:

* i3-12100 -4.3 GHz, sensible chip
* i3-12300 -4.4 GHz, uh.....
* i5-12400 - 4.4 GHz - the popular chip
* i5-12500 - 4.6GHz, bigger IGP
* i5-12600 - 4.8 GHz
* i5-12600K - 4.9 GHz, more cores, unlocked

Here there's a BIG difference to the 12600K, the only question is price.
 
What was the actual memory configuration used for the tests in this review? Unless I'm missing something the only mention is in the test bed section which lists both a DDR5 and DDR4 configuration but it isn't specified which one is actually used.

Also are all the Alder Lake comparison points using the DDR5 configuration? This seems to be the case matching against the 12300 review (as the results match for the DDR5 data set). If so can this information be specified in future content?

On this topic however I'm wondering if having DDR5, if this is the case, as the standard comparison point is really the best choice for CPUs like this. Are people looking to buy the 12600 and lower (such as the 12300) really considering the premium of DDR5 over DDR4? At least to me it doesn't seem like it would make sense to buy in this segment for cost reasons while at the same time paying a much higher premium for memory.
 
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