Intel 12th-gen Core i9-12900K & i5-12600K Workstation Performance Review

Lightroom Classic

On the previous page, we saw the Core i9-12900K prove to be a fierce competitor to the Ryzen 9 5950X, beating it out in the majority of tests. In Lightroom, we see the 5950X claw back in its fight, keeping pegged to the top of both export tests. This is one workload that seems to favor not just efficient architectures, but additional cores, as well.

What’s perhaps most impressive about the results above is how much Intel has improved in this workload from one generation to the next. It used to be that even modest Ryzens could outperform Intel’s higher-end CPUs, just as we see here with the 6-core 5600X outperforming the 8-core i9-11900K.

Before going into this test, we wondered it the unique design of the new Alder Lake-derived chips would result in strange Lightroom results, but that’s not the case at all. There’s no other way to say it: Intel dramatically improved Lightroom performance between its 11th- and 12th-gen Core CPUs.

The above results also make us daydream about how prospective Core X-series CPUs infused with the Alder Lake architecture would fare in this workload. From previous testing, we’ve seen AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper series perform great in the JPG export, but not so much in the DNG. If Intel could dominate both with Core X, that’d be pretty cool to see.

BRAW Speed Test

We’ve long seen AMD’s higher core count CPUs perform great in BRAW Speed Test, but this becomes yet another example of how efficient Intel’s new architecture is, as both the 12600K and 12900K perform seriously well against the competition they’re going up against. Just don’t forget to also equip your rig with a powerful GPU, since DaVinci Resolve will take good advantage of that, too.

HandBrake

We need to be honest: when we first began benchmarking Intel’s 12th-gen chips, we were ignorant of just how much better the architecture was over 11th-gen. Naturally, companies always talk positively about architecture upgrades with any new generation, but the 12th-gen release has been downright refreshing due of the stark improvements we’re seeing.

HandBrake is the latest example: the 8+8 design of the 12900K has no problem being efficient with either AVC or HEVC encoding here. While the 16-core 5950X ultimately wins, it’s impressive that Intel’s 8 high-performance cores tied to 8 energy-efficient cores are working this well together.

LameXP

We wrap up our encoding results with one of our favorite scenarios: music encoding. This test couldn’t be simpler: just toss 500 FLAC files at LameXP, and encode them to MP3. This is a process that used to be inefficient on many-core CPUs, but that’s sure not the case nowadays. Yet again, we see Intel performing extremely well here, with the 6+4 core design of the i5-12600K being enough to beat out last-gen’s 8-core i9-11900K.

On the next two pages, we’ll get into a performance scenario that always leads to taking great advantage of an efficient architecture and as many cores as you can throw at it: rendering.