Ryzen 5 7600X vs. Intel Core i5-12600K

Since its release in 2021, the Core i5-12600K is one of the best CPUs you can buy, thanks to its mid-range price and good performance. It dethroned AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600X, which now sells for nearly $100 less to make up for its weaker performance. However, the Ryzen 7000 is on the horizon, and the Ryzen 5 7600X could do to the 12600K what the 12600K did to the 5600X.

Prices and availability

Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

The Core i5-12600K was released in 2021 and you can currently buy it for around $280 or $270 if you get the KF version that doesn’t have integrated graphics. Meanwhile, the 7600X will launch on September 27 at $299, which is slightly more expensive than Intel’s year-old midrange champ.

However, there are two factors that could help make the 12600K look even better. For starters, it’s often hard to find new PC components soon after launch, and while AMD’s CEO says that won’t happen with Zen 4 CPUs like the Ryzen 7000, it’s definitely a distinct possibility. It’s also worth considering that the 12600K’s price could drop further; it launched at $299 in 2021 and hasn’t dropped much since, unlike other Intel processors.

We’ll have to wait and see how things go, but the 12600K certainly has the edge in terms of availability and price simply because it’s been on the market longer.

Glasses

It’s getting harder and harder to glean anything useful from spec comparisons as AMD and Intel take different paths to improve CPU performance, leading to radically different designs. Without third-party benchmarks though, this is (almost) all we have for now.

The 7600X has four fewer cores than the 12600K, but there’s a catch. The four 12600K cores are efficient cores, which are more power efficient, as the name implies, but they don’t have the same levels of performance. That leaves the 12600K with six performance cores, which have much better performance at the cost of efficiency. Meanwhile, the 7600X has six cores that are more comparable to six cores in 12600K performance. In that sense, two CPUs are better than you might initially think.

Similarly, the 7600X’s advantage in clock speed and cache is certainly good for performance (especially in games), but it’s impossible to make a performance judgment based on that alone. Many CPUs with lower clocks and smaller caches are still very fast, since the CPU design is not just clock and cache.

The only spec here that might be relevant to you is power consumption. Although the 7600X appears to use much less power than the 12600K, AMD and Intel measure power (or TDP) differently. Intel CPUs typically consume power equal to the TDP, while AMD CPUs typically consume 30% more. The 7600X will probably draw a few watts less than the 12600K, but not enough to make a significant difference.

Performance

The 7600X isn’t available yet, so we don’t have any independent benchmarks to follow. AMD demonstrated the performance of the Ryzen 7000 at its unveiling event, but we don’t take proprietary benchmarks as gospel due to their inherent bias.

Aside from the Ryzen 9 7950X, AMD’s most talked about CPU was the 7600X, which the company claims is 5% faster for gaming than Intel’s flagship Core i9-12900K. AMD tested AAA titles like cyberpunk 2077 and rainbow six siege, which at least means that the comparison is not flawed because AMD only picked games that run well on Ryzen. For a 12600K, that would mean the 7600X is at least 5% faster in games, if not more.

AMD did not provide other benchmarks, but said the 7950X will have 29% higher single-threaded and 44% higher multi-threaded performance than the Ryzen 9 5950X. We can probably assume that the 7600X will have a similar single thread gain compared to the 5600X, which also means that the 7600X could be 10% faster than the 12600K.

However, in terms of multi-threaded performance, expecting 44% more is unrealistic. The 7950X has a much higher power cap than the 5950X, which was hampered by a relatively low power cap. While the 7600X also has higher power consumption than the 5600X, adding more power is much more important for flagship models with 16 cores than for midrange processors with just six cores. We can probably expect the improvement for multithreading to be around 20-30%, which would put the 7600X perhaps 10% or even 20% ahead of the 12600K in most multithreaded benchmarks, but this is pure speculation for now.

The 7600X will most likely be ahead of the 12600K in most benchmarks, but not by a huge margin, as Intel’s 12th-gen CPUs were pretty fast when they came out in 2021.

Characteristics

AMD is finally catching up with Intel on features by adding support for PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory with the Ryzen 7000. Technically, AMD has the advantage here, but it’s hard to say that this advantage makes the 7600X particularly better than the 12600K.

Current generation Intel LGA1700 Alder Lake motherboards support PCIe 5.0, but only for NVMe Solid State Drives (SSDs), not GPUs. All AM5 motherboards support PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives, and higher models will also include PCIe 5.0 GPU support. That said, AMD’s advantage here isn’t as relevant for mid-range processors; If you’re shopping for a mid-range CPU, you’re probably on a tight budget, and spending that budget just to get PCIe 5.0 support for your GPU (especially when PCIe 5 GPUs aren’t currently available) would be a poor investment, especially when that support might not mean better gaming performance.

AM5 motherboards support 5200 MHz DDR5 RAM, which is higher than the 4800 MHz supported by LGA1700, but this isn’t a particularly big advantage since most RAM kits come with the XMP profile which simply throttles the RAM regardless of the officially supported frequency. In fact, for mid-range PCs, the 12600K might be more attractive because it supports DDR4 RAM, which is slightly slower but much cheaper than DDR5.

Overall, there’s a negligible difference between the 7600X and 12600K when it comes to features, though the AM5 is arguably more modern. It just boils down to high-end features that are too expensive for anyone building a mid-range PC, the kind of desktop PC you’d want a 7600X or 12600K to have.

Wait and see

While the Ryzen 7600X will almost certainly be the fastest CPU in this head-to-head matchup, we won’t know for sure, or by how much, until the new AMD chip is available for testing. Rest assured, we will be in contact with him as soon as that happens and will have reference points with you as soon as the embargo is lifted.

In the meantime, if you want to stay up to date with the latest Ryzen 7000 news, follow our everything Zen 4 guide.

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Categories: GAMING
Source: tiengtrunghaato.edu.vn