Test: Alder Lake Intel i9-12900K and i5-12600K

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Overclocking:

Overclocking, our passion. It is of course on this point that we spent many hours to understand the subtleties of Alder Lake and DDR5. But we won’t reveal everything here, but rather tease it out to prepare you for the 17-hour test of the ROG Z690 APEX. All tests were performed on this card. In order to keep the suspense going until 5pm, here is a series of captures that will keep you waiting and coming back in a few hours.

i9-12900K and i5-12600K :

Regarding the i9-12900K, it will be possible to overclock it in two ways to submit your scores to Hwbot. Either by keeping all the cores or by disabling the E-core. The maximum frequency we were able to reach is 5300 MHz on the 8 Performance cores at 1.29 volts. As you can see, it heats up a lot. We can only recommend a custom watercooling solution.

The i5-12600K gave us a very pleasant surprise. We went from 4.5 GHz to 5.1 GHz (1.28 volts), while maintaining an acceptable temperature. It should be noted that we are on a custom cooling solution based on a 480 mm radiator.

GSKill 5600 MHz CL36 to 6600 MHz CL38 kit:

Overclocking the DDR5 also went very well. The presence of profiles on the Z690 APEX is a really great feature. We have quite a good number of scores to share with you, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for that.

A bit teasing though: we pushed one of our kit to 6600 MHz CL38, but did not find stability yet. However, we also overclocked a 6000 CL32 and this has given us huge performance.

See you at 5pm for a detailed look at the overclocking of the 12900K, 12600K and the GSKill Trident Z5 5600 CL36 kit. We will of course present and detail the BIOS options and the settings used.