Only yesterday we wrote about Intel's cunning, allowed in the official comparison of the performance of the Core i9-12900K and Ryzen 9 5950X , and today there are new details about CPU Alder Lake, which also directly relate to performance. But if yesterday it seemed that in its normal state the Core i9-12900K, if it does not exceed the performance of the current AMD flagship, then at least will be at the same level with it, then, according to new data, the Core i9-12900K, equipped with the “wrong” motherboard, will run 30% slower than if used with a mid-range or high-end motherboard. That is, when using a bundle "Aler Lake + cheap motherboard" there is no question of any parity with the Ryzen 9 5950X. But what is the problem?
As it turned out during real tests, Alder Lake is very demanding on the motherboard power subsystem. Inexpensive solutions cannot deliver 135W of power for the long time required for optimal performance of the Alder Lake CPU. Recall that the Power Limit 1 of these CPUs is 125 W, but they naturally consume more under load.
Power shortages result in lower frequencies in Boost mode. As a result, the performance of the Core i9-12900K drops by 25-30%, the Core i7-12700K - by 21-25%, the Core i5-12600K - by 7-9%. The experiment showed that for normal operation of top-end Alder Lake CPUs, a motherboard with a power subsystem built according to the "10 + 1 phase" scheme, producing a current of 50 A with DrMOS integrated circuits, is required. Everything is the same, but with the "6 + 1 phase" scheme, it is already a bottleneck for system performance.
Interestingly, the Asus motherboards based on the Intel Z690 chipset, which we wrote about at the weekend , do not have a single model with a power subsystem of less than 11 phases. But other manufacturers will have such solutions. So when choosing a motherboard for CPU Alder Lake, you need to look not only at the type of supported RAM, but also pay close attention to the power subsystem.
0 Comments