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As others have sort of pointed out, your opening sentence is incorrect. That "307W" draw is "Full System Power Consumption", not just the CPU. The 12900K will draw around 230-240W at max load (when doing work like Blender renders), compared to 140W for a 5900X.

But for Gaming loads where the CPU maxes out, I haven't seen reviewers hit those numbers. The 12900K was using ~125W in those workloads, just a few watts lower than AMD.

Now, if you go down to Intel's midrange (i5, not the i9 you were quoting), the power usage is way down (at 125W), vs the AMD 5600X at 75W with a blender workload. Gaming workload, Intel is a few watts higher than AMD.

Yes, Intel is drawing way more power for super CPU intensive tasks, but for what most people will be doing, it's pretty even.

Source: LTT review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EogHCFd7w0&t=513s

So instead of drawing 50% more power than the AMD chip, the Intel chip draws closer to 70% more power.

>Yes, Intel is drawing way more power for super CPU intensive tasks, but for what most people will be doing, it's pretty even.

This. I honestly don't get why people are so focused suddenly on the power consumption for a desktop CPU designed for enthusiasts who want top performance at any cost.

GPUs are consuming way more power than that(Nvidia's Ampere is a notorious power hog), pushing consumers to 700W+ PSUs and nobody bats an eye, but seem to throw their hands in the air when their CPUs get close to that of a GPU.

Like why? It's the top spec model, it's supposed to be ludicrous, not be good value for money or highly efficient, they have other models more competitive for that. It feels like people are just looking for reasons to to create outrage about a product they're not gonna buy anyway.

Because there isn't a proportional performance gain, and the heat generated will degrade the computer, at what cost? A few irrelevant percentage points?

If you're concerned about proportional performance gains, this product isn't for you. So why are you complaining about something you're not gonna buy anyway?

Most tech products that are the tip of the spear are bad value for money and less energy efficient than the ones down the range (Nvidia 3090 vs 3080 for example) as they pass the point of diminishing returns of what the design can do and what's cheap and easy to manufacture.

But they exist because there is a marke of enthusiasts for whom efficiency or price does not matter, they just want the best performance money can buy because maybe their business use case benefits from the 10% shorter render/compile times at the cost of 50% extra power consumption. Who are you to judge?

To feel better about my non Intel purchase by laughing at the performance.

If that is true they should be comparing it to the Epyc 7763 or other CPUs that aren't meant to be reasonably priced. No reason a true enthusiast would pick this CPU over Epyc.

>To feel better about my non Intel purchase by laughing at the performance.

That just sounds childish.

It’s a self deprecating joke, dude. People make these to de-escalate situations safely. I sometimes really wonder at the social skills of people on this website.

>It’s a self deprecating joke, dude.

Jokes are usually meant to be funny.

>I sometimes really wonder at the social skills of people on this website.

One's social skills are not defined by comprehension of poor attempts at snarky humor on the internet.

> they should be comparing it to the Epyc 7763

That's a server chip/line, no? And therefore will have significantly worse per-core performance, one of the most important things for non-embarrassingly-parallel compute tasks?

Edit: and after a cursory search, is it not also true that Epyc line is 4-8x higher priced than the 12900k MSRP?

heat barely degrades consumer pc components, and certainly not on timescales dominated by Moores law.

You really believe that? Feel free run your computer after you take off the heatsinks of your computer, removing all the fans, and removing all the heatsink paste if you truly believe heat doesn't degrade pc components. Feel free to post the results.

you should feel bad for posting such an obviously obtuse comment in bad faith

I don’t, because you are wrong about heat. Heat matters to everyone. If heat didn’t matter on regular timescales graphics cards would never break and crypto miners wouldn’t care about their hardware getting hot.

how do you explain benchmarks showing no difference between used and new gpu performance? if a card posts its age is not a concern

https://youtu.be/44JqNJq-PC0

https://youtu.be/hKqVvXTanzI

The 480 was probably barely used and the mining GPU are used at low power and controlled temperatures. It proves my point.

Old doesn’t mean heat abused. Gaming laptops or ones with discrete GPUs often have issues and it’s always because of the GPU. If it posts it doesn’t mean that the GPU won’t die soon or is problem free, gaming laptops have the most heat abuse and are constantly dying and having issues. Performance degradation because it’s old is a different claim from saying heat damage doesn’t exist.

Intel have a rich and storied history of paying for biased and dishonest reviews. You should be thankful that people are willing to fill in the gaps so you hear the full story.

But we're talking a small lead in many cases, a lot of times a tie, for 30% higher power draw here.

> I honestly don't get why people are so focused suddenly on the power consumption for a desktop CPU designed for enthusiasts who want top performance at any cost.

Because if you up the Power/Current limits on a Ryzen, they will run faster - especially in tests like Cinebench. You won't even have to 'overclock' them. Simply allow them to draw more power if your cooling, motherboard, and PSU can handle it.

To make that a fair test the tester would have had to crank those settings up as far as they go, or until they match the Intel processor. If the Intel processor is allowed to draw 250W, the Ryzen should get the same treatment.

For example a Ryzen 5900X at ~135W (CPU Package) should score around 8200 in Cinebench r20, and at ~200W it should score around 8900.

Since in the test those 200W are apparently for the whole system, it's pretty obvious the tester left those at the stock values.

So will Intels parts and so will GPUs for that matter.

It's still overclocking.

PBO will drive a 5950X to something like 310W in some applications.

Overclocking is running a CPU at higher clock speeds than advertised.

If you just change PBO limits, it never goes beyond what AMD knows their silicon can handle, and what is sold to the customer. Individual cores might already be boosting to those clock speeds over short intervals. You're just allowing more cores to do that and longer, within your configured power limits. The expectation here is thermal throttling, not an unstable system.

Oh please.

No one pretends PBO is not overclocking. Not even AMD:

> Precision Boost 2 is a performance-maximizing technology available in all AMD Ryzen™ and Ryzen™ Threadripper™ 2000 Series processors (or newer). This technology can improve your PC’s performance by raising clockspeeds

-

And PBO still voids your warranty and does not magically respect some limit: https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/understanding-precision-...

> Because Precision Boost Overdrive enables operation of the processor outside of specifications and in excess of factory settings, use of the feature invalidates the AMD product warranty and may also void warranties offered by the system manufacturer or retailer.

-

Reply because I'm getting rate limited, probably over that one time I wasn't nice to dang

> Changing these values will not make your CPU reach voltages it wouldn't otherwise have reached, nor will it make your CPU reach clock speeds it wouldn't otherwise hit.

This is patently false! I don't know where you got this idea when I literally just quoted AMD saying it raises clocks past factory specifications!

Also sure where you think the additional power draw comes from...

AMD literally uses the tagline: "Precision Boost Overdrive: A Smarter Way to Overclock" -

I see no point in continuing a conversation with someone who doesn't understand the basic tenets of the technology they're trying to split hairs over.

PBO is overclocking. Simple as that.

PBO allows overclocking[1]. But it mainly allows you to configure other stuff, liking raising/lowering certain limits, that are not overclocking. Changing these values will not make your CPU reach voltages it wouldn't otherwise have reached, nor will it make your CPU reach clock speeds it wouldn't otherwise hit. It will however make your CPU draw more amps and use more watts to sustain clocks for longer than normal and on more cores at once.

Allowing here means that in the typical motherboard you'll have to change PBO from the default "Auto" to "Manual" to see these settings.

Where do terms like "undervolting", "overvolting", "setting TDP" even fit in your vocabulary if you insist everything is to be called "overclocking"? These terms should be literally self-explanatory.

[1] But only technically, because for some reason the AutoOC feature is found in the PBO menu on motherboards, even though AutoOC is not part of PBO. They are however typically marketed together.

That's not a very technical article, though.

Are you calling this explanation completely wrong?: https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3491-explaining-precision... This is someone who should really know what they're talking about.

> What is important to note is that PBO only affects these three power limits. The effect on CPU clock speed is indirect, and PBO will never boost the CPU past the advertised clocks.

I think it's fair to say adjusting power limits falls under a deliberately broad "overclocking" umbrella, but it's not really overclocking, and doesn't require you to do the effort part of real overclocking.

> This is patently false! I don't know where you got this idea when I literally just quoted AMD saying it raises clocks past factory specifications!

The part you quoted doesn't have the word 'clocks'.

> The part you quoted doesn't have the word 'clocks'.

If you don't know clocks is slang for clockspeed, you're out of your depth. So just stop talking.

> This technology can improve your PC’s performance by raising clockspeeds

And you're saying that technical documents from AMD don't know what they're talking about (it's a technical document. It's a technical article.)

But GN, the kings of stating guesses confidently with the worst understanding of statistics I've ever seen to an uninformed crowd do?

Please. I don't even care how you cope with PBO being an overclock anymore, call it a "raising clock speeds over stock" if it helps you sleep.

> If you don't know clocks is slang for clockspeed, you're out of your depth. So just stop talking.

I phrased that badly. I was talking about the second quote there.

It's a little bit subtle.

The first quote says it will raise clock speeds.

The second quote says it will operate outside of specifications.

But nowhere does it say the clock speeds will be outside the specification.

It's raising the power limits outside the specification so that it can raise clock speeds inside the specification.

> And you're saying that technical documents from AMD don't know what they're talking about (it's a technical document. It's a technical article.)

If you can quote me something from AMD that specifically says PBO (not AutoOC) raises the maximum clock speed above the number you can boost to within spec, I will admit I was wrong and apologize. But the page you linked doesn't say that.

> To make that a fair test the tester would have had to crank those settings up as far as they go, or until they match the Intel processor.

The test was perfectly fair because they used the CPU as delivered, as the average user would use it.

Nobody is buying these CPUs to overclock them to a specific power usage. They're either running them stock or running them at whatever comfortable overclock they can get away with.

Test stock versus stock and overclocked versus overclocked. Trying to normalize to specific power consumption doesn't make sense for enthusiast builds.

> Trying to normalize to specific power consumption doesn't make sense for enthusiast builds.

You surely mean "for low end" builds? Because for enthusiast builds it makes a lot of sense.

Why would you set up "enthusiast" level cooling that can handle 200W and higher, and then keep your CPU set to the default 135W?

At that point one should be buying prebuilt and hope the manufacturer properly sets up the system, because one clearly can't.

"Nobody is buying these CPUs to overclock them to a specific power usage"

I am my friends are these 'nobody', we cant be arsed to overclock but want them to use all power avaliable

it affects cooling. gpu dies are way bigger than cpu dies. a cpu that draws almost as much power as a high end gpu is way more difficult to cool. I don't really care about price/performance that much, but I don't want my pc to sound like a jet engine at load.

> I honestly don't get why people are so focused suddenly on the power consumption for a desktop CPU designed for enthusiasts who want top performance at any cost.

These are individuals with an interest in harming Intel and propping up AMD.

Intel is doing a fine job themselves in terms of harming intel and propping up AMD. Intel themselves has focused on power efficiency after ivy bridge, and people care about energy bills and being green.

Who do you recommend this CPU to?

"These are individuals with an interest in harming Intel and propping up AMD"

Harming the compaby that was fines billions for market manipukation against AMD?

feels like m1 broke a lot of people's brains about performance-per-watt. like, maybe that metric matters if you're running a laptop that has a battery and physically heats up your lap. but nobody with a desktop pc cares about a 100w tdp difference so long as the chips can be cooled

I care about a 100W TDP difference in that a cheap cooler will sound like a jet engine, and a powerful cooler will cost more, in addition to a hot CPU making my room warmer.

who are these mythical consumers that are so price sensitive for a $100 cooler but not when it comes to an $800+ cpu

> There's no way that Intel processor is beating a 5950X that is also drawing 300W. At that point some Ryzen's will be operating at close to 6GHz per core.

Modern desktop CPUs are already being pushed well past the peak perf/watt efficiency in order to extract the maximum amount of performance. A Ryzen 9 5950X would need substantially more than 300W to hit 6 GHz, and you would need exotic sub-ambient cooling to keep it stable at those speeds.

A more reasonable comparison would be against EPYC and Threadripper, both of which use their respective power budgets for more cores rather than more clocks. A 64-core EPYC 7763 has a TDP of about 280W, and it's going to substantially outperform the Core i9-12900K when given 300W of power.

Outperform it assuming your workload can actually saturate 64 cores. In the desktop market though, and heck often in the server market, you're going to struggle to do that. Single thread performance is still hyper important and that isn't going to change anytime soon. Intel seem to have the edge there, in a big way.

If you can scale to 32 cores, then you probably scale to 64 too.

Yeah, but many desktop workloads can't do that either.

You can give a 5950x all the wattage all day but it really doesn't get much faster until you start dropping the temps to sub ambient. I have a 480mm radiator dedicated to my 5950X along with high quality RAM and extensive tuning (sub timings, fabric clocks) and I'm not able to get anywhere near 6 GHz at room temp without a voltage level that would destroy the chip after a few benchmarks.

And while I think my highly optimized 5950x setup could probably eek out the 12900k cinebench multicore score I'm sure if you gave me 10 minutes to also be fair and tweak a few settings on the 12900K I could get that to win again, even without messing with max power.

I do agree the Ryzen numbers in the article do in general seem lower than normal though.

Given this is Intel's "Catch up multiple nodes, new performance design, 300 watt class, ddr5" CPU and it's only able to get this eek ahead vs AMD's CPU from last year which is about to get the same litany of improvements plus their stacked cache improvement I'm not holding my breath Intel is really innovating fast enough again but at least they don't seem to be sitting still anymore.

What is the cold temp helping with? AFAIK transistors no longer get faster at cold, at least since 16nm the perforamce at sub 1V thin-ox transistors is pretty flat with temperature. Cold helps a lot with power though, leakage at hot (100C) could be 20W, so maybe going cold allowed more dynamic power dissapation? I'd be intersted to hear what the overclock experts like yourself think.

Unless anything has changed the silicon/die itself isn't staying sub ambient at all it's just that there's a limit to hot steep temperature gradient you can build when the ambient/sink temperature is fixed.

Transistors have a maximum operating temperature[1] (Tj_max), and the package has a fixed thermal resistance[2].

If the junction-to-case thermal resistance is 0.5 deg C/W and CPU dissipates 100W, then the junction will operate at 50 deg C above the case temperature, whatever that is.

If the case is kept at room temperature (say 25 deg C), which is the best possible a simple air or water cooled system can do, then the junction will operate at 75 deg C.

For simple discrete transistors and diodes, Tj_max is typically 150-175 deg C. For modern CPUs I believe it's closer to 100-125 deg C.

Thus, lowering the case temperature means the chip can consume more power before reaching the maximum junction temperature.

A greater power budget means you could raise operating voltages to help with overclocking for example. Keep in mind power dissipation scales with voltage squared.

There might be other effects too, I'm no overclocking expert, but this is one aspect.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junction_temperature

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_resistance

Leakage increases with temperature, and the speed at which FET switches also increases with temperature.

Speed, is that due to Vgs threshold voltage decreasing as temp increases? On the other hand you have Rds(on) rising as temp increases, which would negate some of that effect I would imagine (lower gate drive current).

But not my field so no idea how that interplay works out.

Carrier injection speed is a function of temperature.

Think of FET as a solid state thermionic valve, it's not that far away from it, if you dig into physics.

Thanks. You definitely don't want the junction temp anywhere near 125c, the leakage would be very high. I thought most processors in due temp was 75-85c max, and will throttle severely if it goes above that.

Tj_max is listed under "absolute maximum ratings", so indeed operating conditions should be well below that. I see I was a bit sloppy in my wording.

The cold temperature increases the clocks that AMD's boosting algorithm will request. See here for a demonstration using LN2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g94rNe4XSGU

If 5950x was designed for 240W max power like 12900k, then it is likely that the optimizations AMD would have needed to implement in the silicon would have also provided some additional frequency headroom. It's all hypothetical though since all we can do is compare the chips that were actually produced.

In the Gamers Nexus review, they were using a high end 360MM AIO cooler and the CPU Temp shot up to 74C almost immediately during a blender session. Definitely a hot, power hungry CPU.

immediate temp fluctuation is more of a heat transfer problem, not overall thermal budget.

It seems like all the focus has been on how these chips are at maximum load. I wonder how they perform under more typical light/mixed loads.

AFAIK, the theoretical benefit of doing the big-little arrangement is improved power scaling with load. At partial load, powering a wimpy "e-core" at its ideal clock speed should be more efficient (instructions per kwh) & possibly have better latency characteristics than the usual approach of doing a drastic underclock & undervolt on big performance-oriented cores.

Naturally I'm interested in seeing whether that theoretical advantage of the architecture has paid off. The maximum speed performance stats and wattage numbers give an incomplete picture. I want to see wattage and performance metrics across the spectrum of load levels, from <1% all the way up.

If the 12900K delivers roughly 5950 level performance using 25% more power than the 5950, that looks pretty bad. But if the 12900K can deliver 25% of its max performance for only 10% of its max power envelope, and the 5950 needs 30% of its max power envelope to keep up with that load, that's a big deal, and the intel chip will actually be the cooler one more often than not. That dynamism is what reviewers need to focus on explaining & quantifying, IMO.

The LTT review [1] compares full-load-render benchmark tests against more real-world gaming performance, and the temps drop from a sustained 90 degrees to 60 degrees, so you seem to be right, there.

[1] https://youtu.be/-EogHCFd7w0?t=534

What's the die size of the ADL silicon? I know my 5800X will rocket up past 70C even on a custom loop with 30C water temps because the chiplets are so small and power dense that there's not enough surface area to transfer heat any quicker to the IHS.

> In the Gamers Nexus review, they were using a high end 360MM AIO cooler and the CPU Temp shot up to 74C almost immediately during a blender session.

FWIW, my water cooled AMD Ryzen also shoots up to very high temperatures immediately when loaded. It can touch 80C like a lightswitch.

Water coolers have a lot of thermal mass in the water and the metal radiator. The CPU can't instantly heat all of this up.

What's actually happening is that the turbo boost is pushing the CPU as far as possible within the thermal limits on a short-term basis, then slowly lowering the boost frequency as the temperature saturates. Power consumption is very non-linear, so each additional MHz of boost is a significant amount of additional power. The boost algorithms are designed to spike high for short bursts at the onset of load because most desktop operations require short bursts of single-threaded performance.

> FWIW, my water cooled AMD Ryzen also shoots up to very high temperatures immediately when loaded. It can touch 80C like a lightswitch.

you should probably looking at a nocturna dh15, no ryzen (on the market) will get to 80° when loaded, not even in long blender sessions) so you probably have a faulty water cooling or smth.

Definitely not faulty cooling. I have a 3950X on an NH-D15 in the other PC and it does the same thing. Not an amateur when it comes to cooling.

The Ryzen temperature spikes are a well-known phenomenon: https://www.google.com/search?q=ryzen+temperature+spikes

Newer Ryzens can get plenty hot, and by design, e.g. https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-views-ryzen-5000-cpu-temperature...

In my experience with a 5600X and water cooling (nothing crazy, just an off the shelf AIO) sustained full CPU load will be in the 70s, but I've seen it hit 80 or so briefly.

btw. i use a nh-dh15 and run the blender test and i only did go to ~65° maybe I was lucky with the silicion tough. but the stock cooler was horrible.

> FWIW, my water cooled AMD Ryzen also shoots up to very high temperatures immediately when loaded. It can touch 80C like a lightswitch.

It might be interesting to look into a block which covers the chiplets more. Mine does max 55 at normal speeds and PBO max/unlimited power it does about 70C max (and about 220W draw for a 5900X). I have no peaks like you describe. That used to be a bit more with my old water block which had copper on the chiplets but no water channels.

It must be hot because Intel set very high PL1/PL2 for 12900K. I'd like to see realistic performance comparison like PL1/PL1=150W.

> Also their Ryzen numbers are beyond suspicious. On a silent configuration (peak power draw ~209W, 175W sustained, some undervolting) my Ryzen 5900X hits a Cinebench R20 score of 8835 vs their 8390. I suspect my rig is worse since I cheaped out on the RAM, but I wouldn't know because they omit information about the Ryzen test rig.

Firmware quality for AM4 boards is ... "variable". My board restricted CPU power to 60% of nominal because they put in the wrong ADC scaling factors in some BIOS revision. Some boards have PBO enabled by default (which nets big % on the kill-a-watt, less % in performance). Many boards have bad defaults when you enable XMP which steal a few Watts from the actual CPU cores.

CB mostly scales with core frequency, memory and FCLK are less important.

> At that point some Ryzen's will be operating at close to 6GHz per core.

There's no way any of them will get close to 6 GHz without LN2.

> There's no way any of them will get close to 6 GHz without LN2.

No need for LN2, you could probably achieve this easily using a closed loop CO2 system. But I'm not aware of any such systems readily available. Kinda seems like an unfilled niche to me.

If I had to guess the TDP of the new Intel CPU when maxed out is actually around 270-280W. Not all of that 307W is the CPU, there's power used by the motherboard itself, a mostly idle GPU, fans, NVME SSD, etc.

Still a very serious heat producing thing in one socket compared to the AMD.

This also means it's going to require some rather expensive motherboards since reliably delivering 280W to one socket is no simple task.

You don't have to guess, Intel themselves say the "peak" TDP of their top i9 is 250W. All to slightly beat 5900X which tops out at 150W. It's insanity, literally have no idea who will buy this.

People in cold climates.

Computing and heating in one go.

A few lifetimes ago, I worked at a small company where the VP shared with me why we had some "caddilac" service plans (ie, super expensive, cost/benefit=unreasonable).

His reply: These are the showroom-only models where customer won't buy but will feel their (already expensive) not as high end plan is more reasonable.

Essentially it's a part of product marketing segmentation where you create an unobtanium segment that's only there to sell other segments.

The old axiom about people buying the middle priced choice…

Product marketing version of the Overton Window, I guess.

You don't get the bleeding edge tech for practicality or reasonableness. You don't buy a Bugatti Veyron for cargo space and gas mileage. You get silly tech for insane performance at massive cost. Eventually this tech is refined, optimized and made reasonable.

It's what humans do. We don't cross the Pacific on a tiki raft or fly to the moon in a tin bucket because our destination is nicer than where we are currently, we do it because we can and because it's awesome.

I think that's an extremely poor comparison, because this isn't some weird one-off extra special product that is meant to push us forward ahead in computing power. This is just a regular competition for AMD at this point.

To stick with the car comparison, let's use Mercedes C class and BMW 3 series as direct competitors, right? They offer broadly the same features, cost the same amount of money, look similar-ish, you get my point.

So now imagine that one year, BMW releases a new 3 series with revolutionary new engine that makes it go faster by few percent than the C class on average, but at the cost of double fuel consumption.

I'm sure you'd go - what are you doing BMW. You aren't Lamborghini, you aren't pushing the envelope here - you are just pushing your existing framework to the absolute max to beat the competition at a huge cost.

This isn't progress, and this isn't a bugatti veyron equivalent. This is just technological dick waving with no regard to power consumption whatsoever.

Your example is actually very good.

The AMG and ///M models don't ever get compared on mileage, and almost noone who buys them cares in the slightest. They want to know about the performance, full stop.

"almost noone" is doing a lot of work for you here.

I’m curious why you think that? Generally if running costs are compared it’s with a laugh. I’m in a position to mentor young people with large amounts of disposable income who disproportionately spend it on cars (I was one of them once) and I’m about the only person I know who would give them actual running costs to consider.

Very few ever heeded me.

Sure, but this isn't a Core Extreme model(remember those?), This is a c220d using twice as much fuel as a 320d, just to be 0.1s faster to a 100. If that's a good trade off for you, then sure, but I stand by my opinion that this isn't progress and this isn't some incredible humanity pushing achievement - this is just allowing the CPUs to run at crazy power just to beat the competition ever so slightly, because intel still hasn't sorted out their manufacturing nodes.

I think you misunderstand me; I agree with you on this being stupid.

I should have worded it better, as having owned quite fast cars when I was younger the running costs (both to my wallet and the environment) were something I eventually realized were more important than the performance.

TDP isn't really a peak wattage number though, it's hand-wavey.

Did you read the comment you reply to?

Let me make this even clearer - Intel provides two numbers this time round. One "typical" power usage, and one "peak" power usage for every 12th gen CPU. The peak on the top i9 part is 250W, and looking at the reviews that came out today, it seems correct - the CPU will consume 250W of power when running at full load.

I did, my point was more that the Intel and AMD TDPs aren't really super directly comparable because they both use different formulae to compute the numbers.

Maybe I misunderstood you?

I do agree with the second part of your reply, and I also don't know who would buy the Intel part over the AMD part. I think Intel's move into space heaters is disappointing, and once AMD revs their process, micro-architecture and moves to DDR5, I suspect they will once again smoke Intel. Pretty poor showing in my opinion.

>>I did, my point was more that the Intel and AMD TDPs aren't really super directly comparable because they both use different formulae to compute the numbers.

Why do these formulas matter though, if we know, without a doubt, that a fully loaded 5900X/5950X will just sit at 150W usage, but the new 12th Gen i9 at full load sits at 250W. That's not going by what Intel says or what's on the box, that's actual measured power usage which has been now confirmed by reviews.

So yes, sure, let's not compare the given numbers in the spec - but real life numbers do back it up this time.

Totally, and I agree with you! :)

> It's insanity, literally have no idea who will buy this.

It's not insanity. Overclocked enthusiast builds have been pushing over 250W and higher for many years. Quietly cooling a CPU putting out that much heat isn't a mystery any more. Modern coolers are very, very good.

That Intel CPU doesn't come anywhere near 250W during gaming or normal operations anyway. It's not like it's consuming 250W every single time you do something.

Modern GPUs also consume well over 300W during normal gaming, which will be double or triple the consumption of most CPUs. I don't understand this sudden concern about Intel shipping CPUs with high peak TDP.

>>That Intel CPU doesn't come anywhere near 250W during gaming or normal operations anyway. It's not like it's consuming 250W every single time you do something.

It does though, that's the whole reason why I'm complaining. While I'm doing a video transcode on my 5900X putting all cores on full load it won't go above 140W. Do the same on the i9 and it will do it marginally faster sitting at 250W.

The point isn't complaining about 250W usage in general. Of course there are other chips, including other CPUs that use that much or more and it's not the end of the world. The problem here is that you're paying a HUGE price for a very minor advantage over the competition or even their own chips. If you clearly can buy a chip that performs very slightly worse for over 100W reduction in power, why would you buy the space heater one.

Yes overclockers have been doing this literally forever, I'm aware, but this is intel making this decision on stock CPU - I just don't find this acceptable at all.

>> I don't understand this sudden concern about Intel shipping CPUs with high peak TDP.

To summarize the above - because clearly the high peak TDP is much higher than that of competing CPUs for a very minor increase in performance. That's just not ok.

> It's insanity, literally have no idea who will buy this

uh, people who want more performance? 250w is not some absurd tdp that can't be cooled.

But even people who want performance must do a calculation in their head whether something is worth it or not. A CPU that uses 100W+ over the next competing CPU for a very minor performance gain is clearly not worth it, like, surely this isn't a mad assumption.

> We however do know that they used DDR5 RAM for the Intel processor, which the current gen Ryzen don't support. Likely some performance was gained there as well, but obviously they didn't test the Intel processor with DDR4 RAM to get an idea of how much comes down to faster RAM.

Anandtech has a detailed section comparing DDR4 to DDR5: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17047/the-intel-12th-gen-core...

So, up to 18% uplift, weighted towards heavily threaded loads.

I'm getting 10562 on R20 on my 5950x, win10, pbo, flck/ram matched. Not manually overclocked just pbo.

Higher than their benchmarks, the article is fishy. I'm 500 faster than the AMD and 200 Faster than the I9...

Maybe by barn burner they mean it would catch a barn on fire if not properly cooled.

Ha! I thought "they meant literally" when I read the headline...

Apparently Intel used an older build of Windows 11 that has bugs that slows down AMD processors, even though Windows has fixed the issue - https://www.neowin.net/news/charlie-demerjian-intel-used-uno... ...

The linked article says they actually used Win10 for Ryzen tests due to this.

Your comment was more revealing than the article. Thanks for sharing!

Especially with today's high energy prices

Maxing a CPU is very hard in practice, the power usage under realistic loads is actually much less crap.

In particular in gaming loads it even draws less than the same tier AMD products at mostly better results (modulo DDR5 vs DDR4).