A new 12th Gen Intel flagship CPU is on sale at Newegg with some impressive specs
For when you need even faster clock speeds.
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Updated March 25, 2022, at 10:50 a.m. ET:It appears the Newegg listing has been taken down.
What you need to know
Newegg has a new Intel flagship processor available right now that surpasses theIntel Core i9-12900K. This new king of Alder Lake is the Intel Core i9-12900KS, priced at $799.99. As spotted by our partners over atTom’s Hardware, this is just shy of $200 above the asking price of the now relegated Core i9-12900K.
But what’s different with this new CPU? Intel has managed to bump the clock speeds for both Performance and Efficient cores, hitting a Turbo Boost Max 3.0 speed of 5.5GHz. It has the same 16 core hybrid configuration with eight Golden Cove performance cores and eight energy-efficient Gracemont cores clocked at 3.4GHz and 2.5GHz, respectively.
The UHD Graphics 770 from Intel is once again present, so too is the 12MB of L2 cache and 30MB of L3 cache. The Core i9-12900KS will be able to push a little harder out the box before any overclocking is considered. I’ve put the new Core i9-12900KS up against its older sibling and theAMD Ryzen 9 5950Xin the above table.
In order to achieve this 5.5GHz boost clock speeds, Intel is making use of the company’s new Enhanced Thermal Velocity Boost technology, which will likely require BIOS updates on supporting motherboards. This puts Intel in quite the comfortable position against AMD with a comparable offering to the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, which itself struggled to completely outmatch the Core i9-12900K.
If the Core i9-12900K wasn’t fast enough out the gate, you may want to consider the Core i9-12900KS for a new PC build. This beast has higher core clock speeds and TDP.
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Rich Edmonds was formerly a Senior Editor of PC hardware at Windows Central, covering everything related to PC components and NAS. He’s been involved in technology for more than a decade and knows a thing or two about the magic inside a PC chassis. You can follow him on Twitter at@RichEdmonds.
