Intel Alder Lake i9-12900K needs DDR5 RAM just to barely keep up with AMD's Ryzen 5800X3D

While the embargoed reviews for Ryzen 7 5800X3D aren't going to go live until April 20, the chip has already been benchmarked by a Peruvian outlet XanxoGaming and it has put up some very impressive numbers in the case of gaming. The 5800X3D is easily able to outpace the Intel Alder Lake-S Core i9-12900KF CPU in most of the scenarios that are cache heavy, sometimes by massive margins as you can see here.

The comparisons however were conducted using DDR4-3200 CL14 memory kits and one has to wonder how the Core i9 would fare using DDR5 RAM as Alder Lake supports both generations of DDR.

As such, XanxoGaming has went back and tested the i9-12900K, which is essentially the 12900KF with integrated graphics, using DDR5-6000 CL40 memory.

The results for the Intel Alder Lake-S part has definitely improved, though, it still barely manages to keep up with the 5800X3D in some of the situations. Meanwhile, it is still beaten by the Ryzen chip in instances where the performance gap was too much in favor of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. This time time though, only the 1080p data is provided and it is likely that the 720p comparison would have produced more pronounced differences.

While the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is certainly looks like an excellent gaming processor, the part does fall behind in other core heavy areas like rendering or encoding, among others. According to TechPowerUp's review, there is only one instance, during WinRAR compression test, when the new 3D V-cache helps the 5800X3D. Otherwise, it trades blows with the vanilla Ryzen 7 5800X and is slower quite a bit slower than the similarly priced Core i7-12700K.

To be fair to AMD here, the company only ever advertised the 5800X3D as a gaming processor so in that regard, the new Ryzen SKU does deliver.

One thing noteworthy here is that the TechPowerUp review was conducted using the publicly available 4.03.03.431 chipset driver. Meanwhile, the XanxoGaming review was done using the 4.03.03.624 driver which apparently has performance optimizations for the 3D V-cache design. However, TechPowerUp (TPU) does state here that the 431 driver was "recommended by AMD for 5800X3D reviews".

Source and images: XanxoGaming via TPU

Edit: The reviews have gone live today.

Intel Alder Lake i9-12900K needs DDR5 RAM just to barely keep up with AMD's Ryzen 5800X3D