Intel Core i5-12600 vs Intel Core i9-12900K

Core i5-12600 vs Core i9-12900K specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the Core i9-12900K beats the Core i5-12600 in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i5-12600 in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core i9-12900K has significantly more cores with 16 cores compared to the Core i5-12600 that has 6 cores. It also has more threads than the Core i5-12600. These CPUs have different clock speeds. Indeed, the Core i5-12600 has a slightly higher clock speed compared to the Core i9-12900K. Despite this, the Core i9-12900K has a slightly higher turbo speed. A Core i5-12600 CPU outputs less heat than a Core i9-12900K CPU because of its significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

Modern CPUs generally have more logical cores than physical cores, this means that each core is split into multiple virtual cores, improving efficiency for parallel workloads. Indeed, the Core i5-12600 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.