Intel Core i9-12900K CPU Review

Memory & Cache Testing

AIDA64 Engineer Edition

“FinalWire Ltd. today announced the immediate availability of AIDA64 Extreme Edition 1.50 software, a streamlined diagnostic and benchmarking tool for home users; and the immediate availability of AIDA64 Business Edition 1.50 software, an essential network management solution for small and medium scale enterprises. The new AIDA64 update implements AVX-optimized benchmarks for the upcoming Intel Sandy Bridge processors, adds a brand-new video encoding benchmark, and supports the latest AMD and NVIDIA graphics processors.”

Now obviously this is not very apples to apples, but it gives you some idea of what’s coming. DDR5 easily provides much more overall bandwidth given the much higher speeds, but it is not anywhere near as mature and refined yet as DDR4 so overall latency isn’t quite as low.

L1 cache is fairly unique to each architecture so you really can’t compare directly. L2 gives us some idea of what each flavor of core can achieve as L2 is limited to 1 or 2 cores in almost every CPU in the list. L3 is shared between all of the cores in Intel’s 12^th gen and shows plenty of bandwidth. There really aren’t any specific points to make here, as there is no real way to make any serious comparisons that would reflect any real-world performance metric, we just like to show the overall bandwidth of each cache level since AIDA checks it while checking memory performance.

Passmark Performance Test – Memory Mark – Threaded

“Fast, easy to use, PC speed testing, and benchmarking. PassMark Performance Test ™ allows you to objectively benchmark a PC using a variety of different speed tests and compare the results to other computers.”

Here again, we see DDR5’s 4800MT/s base speed just decimate DDR4’s 3200MT/s base speed. There are ultra-high performance DDR4 kits that can match these speeds, but keep in mind DDR5 is going to take off rapidly from here while DDR4 is about at its ceiling.

SiSoft Sandra – Memory Bandwidth – Aggregate.

“SiSoftware Sandra provides a robust package of diagnostic tools for testing your system and teasing out its problems–or potential headaches.”

This is kind of a fun test to look at since we have previous results from quad-channel systems. Intel’s 12900K is only dual-channel, but with DDR5, manages to play in the big kid pool.