Intel cheated in the official test results of its new flagship

During the announcement of the Alder Lake processors last week, Intel gave the results of official tests: it turned out that in games the company's new flagship, the Core i9-12900K, beats the competitor in the face of the Ryzen 9 5950X by about 15%. However, the details of the test conditions revealed now indicate that Intel was cunning, and in reality, the Core i9-12900K will not be faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X.

The thing is that during testing the PL1 value of the Core i9-12900K processor was ... 241 W! In reality, however, it should be equal to 125 W, and the processor consumes 241 W with the PL2 setting. In turn, the Ryzen 9 5950X was also tested with the PL1 installation, but here the TDP was the standard 105 watts. It turns out that in the tests, the thermal package of the Core i9-12900K was significantly expanded, and the processor worked at a much higher frequency than it should have. And the competitor was just working at its usual frequencies. A recent experiment showed that switching from PL1 to PL2 increases the performance of the Core i9-12900K by as much as 35%!

Slide comparison of the performance of Intel and AMD processors from the official presentation

Also worth noting is the fact that Intel used Windows 11 Pro build 22000.9 for benchmarks with known performance issues for AMD processors. These problems were fixed in Windows 11 version 22000.282 so that for the purity of the experiment, you could use it or even Windows 10. In general, everything looks very much like a dirty game. So in reality, it may turn out that the Core i9-12900K is no faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X. Maybe even slower.