Overclocked Intel Core i9-12900KS Special Edition CPU Shines In Benchmark Leak
Intel is releasing a "Special Edition" 12th Gen Core i9-12900KS processor based on its Alder Lake architecture, which ranks as only the second KS chip in the past couple of years (the other one being the 9th Gen Core i9-9900KS we reviewed in October 2019). It's a fast slice of silicon and while not available to buy yet, the chip has surfaced in a leaked benchmark run.
Like the regular Core i9-12900K, the KS variant is a burly 16-core/24-thread consisting of eight high-performance P-cores (Golden Cove) with Hyper Threading support, and eight power-efficient E-cores (Gracemonth). However, the Core i9-12900KS is basically a binned chip that has been qualified to maintain higher clock speeds.
Notably, the Core i9-12900KS can hit a 5.2GHz turbo frequency across all of its performance cores (up from 5GHz on the regular variant), and boasts a max 5.5GHz single-core turbo clock (up from 5.2GHz on the regular variant).
Not content with the already-goosed clocks, a user at Taobo pushed what is like an engineering sample of the chip even further, hitting an all-boost clock of 5.4GHz. They then ran it through Cinebench R23. Here's a look...
They only ran it through the multi-core test, where it posted a score of 29,519. As we would expect, that's a decent jump in performance driven by faster clocks. How much so? Well, here's a collection of our own Cinebench R23 scores from other processors (taken from our Alder Lake performance review)...
- ***Leaked Core i9-12900KS: 29,519
- Core i9-12900K: 26,846
- Ryzen 9 5950X: 24,908
- Core i9-12980XE: 22,371
- Ryzen 9 5900X: 20,717
- Core i5-12600K: 17,414
So based on those scores, the leaked result for the Special Edition chip is around 10 percent higher than a regular Core i9-12900K (also Alder Lake) and about 18.5 percent better than AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X (Zen 3). And of course it mops the floor with lower end chips further down the totem pole.
There are plenty of caveats, of course. For one, this is a leak, so that automatically requires a grain of salt. Secondly, we have no idea what kind of cooling was at play here, and the overclock obviously gives the KS chip some additional horsepower for a less-than-even playing field (when making comparisons).
Still, it's nice to see the Special Edition chip has some overclocking legs, and performs about where we would expect it to.
