Intel Core i5-12600K

Give it up for the new gaming champ

- JACOB RIDLEY

INTEL’S CORE I7 and i9 chips are all-round performance leaders, at least within Intel’s own range of CPUs. But for gamers, it’s actually the Core i5 that rules. Cheaper than an i7 or i9, i5 chips usually give up significant multi-threaded throughput but more or less match their more expensive siblings when it comes to in-game frame rates.

With the Core i5-12600K, the first Core i5 of the Alder Lake generation, that usual refrain may actually understate its abilities. That’s because the 12600K is something even more impressive entirely. In many ways, it matches Intel’s previous-gen top chip, even in multithreading, but in a package that’s almost half the price. That’s Core i9 performance for Core i5 money.

The 12600K is a six-plus-four design. It has six Performance Cores (P-Cores) and four Efficient Cores (E-Cores). This is Intel’s new hybrid approach to CPU design, which we reviewed last month in the top-end Core i9-12900K. The Performance Cores are codenamed Golden Cove and deliver maximum grunt at the highest possible clock speeds.

Meanwhile, the Efficient Cores are based on the Gracemont architecture, essentially a derivative of Intel’s low-power Atom processor. They physically use much less die space and consume far less power. That does not, however, mean they are useless for serious computing tasks. Intel has said that Gracemont cores are roughly on a par with the old Skylake design of 2015 when it comes to single-threaded performance per clock.