Intel Core i9-12900K review — This will begin to make things right

Intel lost its way. That much was obvious as it struggled to spin up its 10nm manufacturing process. This left the company scrambling — especially in the face of a refocused AMD. But Intel claims it has a plan to build competitive desktop processors once again. It’s an ambitious strategy that uses a hybrid chip design with different cores that are better at specific tasks. Intel is also embracing emerging tech like DDR5 system memory. But the reality is that while many of us obsess about these features, most people want a fast and affordable CPU that just works. That is maybe where Intel is finding itself once again with the Core i9-12900K.

The new Intel Core i9-12900K is a fun chip to review. It has a lot going on for $600 price tag. And that makes it fun to compare to what AMD is doing with its $530 Ryzen 9 5900X and its $800 Ryzen 9 5950X. Sure, both the 5900X and the 12900K have 24 threads, but while AMD packs all of those into its efficient and impressive Zen 3 cores, Intel has 16 threads on 8 performance cores and 8 threads with 8 efficiency cores.