Intel’s latest and greatest, the Core i9-12900K Alder Lake processor, was tested against the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X in a Cinebench R20 test. Both the processors were heavily overclocked.
Although the Ryzen 5950X represents an older generation than the Alder Lake CPU, the processors managed to hit an exact tie in the benchmark.
AMD and Intel faced off in an epic overclocking battle, courtesy of Splave, the #1 overclocker in the world. Splave is known for pushing hardware past its absolute limit, and that’s exactly what happened during this unprecedented benchmark.
He shared his overclocking success alongside an interesting result: Both the Alder Lake and Ryzen 9 5950X achieved the exact same score in Cinebench R20. Each scoring 15,664 points, the CPUs managed to beat world records. In fact, the AMD benchmark dates a year back, and it still remains the highest score ever achieved by any AMD Ryzen 5000 series CPU to date.
Intel and AMD each achieved extremely high clock speeds as a result of this world-record overclocking session. On the main performance (P) cores, Intel Core i9-12900K managed to hit a clock speed of 6.9GHz at a core voltage of 1.58v. Splave also overclocked the smaller efficiency (E) cores up to 5.4GHz at a voltage of 1.57V.
The Intel system featured 16GB of DDR5 memory running at a frequency of 6565MHz as well as an AsRock Z690 Aqua OC motherboard. Liquid nitrogen cooling was used in both platforms to make these frequencies possible.
AMD Ryzen 5950X also managed to hit impressive heights in terms of clock speeds. It was overclocked to a full 6GHz on all 16 cores. The voltage was not revealed, but we do know that the system also had an AsRock X570 Aqua motherboard and 16GB of 4000MHz DDR4 memory.
Intel Alder Lake Core i9-12900K runs on a completely different architecture from the AMD Ryzen 5950X. On top of that, as the Ryzen benchmark is nearly a year old, the hardware the CPU was paired with also differs. Both these CPUs hitting an absolute tie in any benchmark is extremely unlikely — and yet, it happened.
The Core i9-12900K CPU is Intel’s freshly released high-end offering with a mix of performance cores and efficiency cores. The Ryzen 9 5950X, although it is still part of the current generation of AMD processors, comes from an older line of CPUs. AMD is still yet to release the real competitor to Alder Lake — that won’t happen until 2022. However, as it is currently AMD’s best processor, it is often compared to the Intel Alder Lake, and it’s hard to deny that both models are excellent.
Intel Alder Lake has mostly been seeing fantastic results in benchmarks, and this one is no different: It is, after all, a world record. However, seeing AMD’s current Zen 3-based CPU compete with Intel’s newest speaks well of the processor and proves that exciting times are ahead in 2022.
