We've probably seen close to four million leaks related to Intel's upcoming flagship desktop CPU, the
Core i9-12900K, but what about the non-K version without an unlocked multiplier? It has pretty much shied away from early cameos. That said, it is the star of the latest leaked benchmark making the rounds, which also happens to co-star an ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme motherboard.
Neither of those parts officially exist yet, and won't until sometime next month, assuming Intel announces
Alder Lake in October as previously rumored. But a launch being right around the corner, there is great opportunity for these types of leaks—in this case, someone at ASUS probably ran the Core i9-12900 through a UserBenchmark run, with the results posted online.
Have a look...
Click to Enlarge (Source: UserBenchmark)
UserBenchmark identified the Core i9-12900 as being a 16-core/24-thread CPU, which is in line with the "K" model. That's a full core and thread configuration for Alder Lake, consisting of eight high performance Golden Cove cores mingling with eight power efficient Gracemont cores. The big cores (Golden Cove) support Hyper Threading while the small cores (Gracemont) do not, hence the 16 cores and 24 threads (8 big cores + 8 threads + 8 small cores = 24).
The rest of the relevant testbed was made up of a single stick of Crucial DDR5-4800 memory, a couple of SSDs, and the aforementioned
ASUS motherboard based on Intel's upcoming Z690 chipset. And as for the display, it's listed as having a 1280x1024 resolution.
According to the database entry, the CPU was running at 2.4GHz to 4.25GHz. Having just a single memory module could negatively affect performance, but for what it's worth, the system posted a single-threaded score of 214 and a multi-threaded score of 2,510.
To put those into perspective, the average scores for an
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X are 159 for the single-threaded test (and 166 max) and 1,637 for the multi-threaded test (and 1,740 max). So based on those results, the leaked Core i9-12900 scored 34.6 percent higher in the single-threaded test and 53.3 percent higher in the multi-threaded test. Or 28.9 percent and 44.3 percent, respectively, if comparing to the highest scores achieved by the Ryzen 7 5800X.
Assuming this is a legitimate benchmark run, there are a couple of other interesting factors. One is that this was run on Windows 10, whereas Windows 11 is better suited for hybrid architectures, as we have seen in our own
Windows 11 tests. And secondly, the database entry notes that the CPU was throttled at 92 percent by Windows.
All those things considered, this is yet another promising
leaked Alder Lake benchmark. Though as always, we'll have to wait for Alder Lake to arrive before we know for sure how it performs and compares to Rocket Lake and AMD's silicon.