Handling the task of overclocking was Tom’s Hardware resident overclocking guru, Allen “Splave” Golibersuch and along with him, several tanks of liquid nitrogen (LN2) to help him push all cores on the new CPU. And by all cores, we mean all the cores, and that includes the Golden Cove P-Cores and Gracemont E-Cores. Splave pushed the 12900K’s P-Cores to run at 6.8GHz, while the E-Cores were pushed to run at 5.3GHz. For context, the 12900K has a maximum boost clock of 5.2GHz for its P-Cores and 3.9GHz for the E-Cores. Components-wise, Splave was also using an ASRock Z690 Aqua OC Edition motherboard, along with some DDR5 RAM that was also overclocked – from 4800MHz to 6200MHz with C34 timings – courtesy of Klevv, plus a 1600W EVGA SuperNOVA PSU. To be fair, 6.8GHz isn’t the highest overclocked speeds to be achieved on an Intel CPU; earlier in the year, one overclocker managed to push Intel’s 11th generation Core i9-11900K to run at 7GHz on LN2. However, in this instance, Splave’s achievement is still considered a world record, as it is the first consumer-ready desktop CPU with a hybrid architecture to be pushed to such extremes. Specifically, Splave was able to achieve single and multi-core Geekbench 5 scores of 2740 and 26649 points, respectively, with the 12900K’s P-Cores running at 6.8GHz and E-Cores at 5.3GHz. That makes the CPU approximately 19% faster than the 11900K and 27% against the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. Intel’s Alder Lake desktop CPU lineup is already available for preorders with several retailers in the US, while global availability of the processors is slated for 4 November. At the time of writing, there is still no local pricing. (Source: Tom’s Hardware)
