Intel Core i5-12600 vs Intel Core i9-7900X

Core i5-12600 vs Core i9-7900X comparison

In our benchmarks, the Core i5-12600 beats the Core i9-7900X in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i9-7900X in all gaming tests too.

With info from our database, we find that the Core i9-7900X has significantly more cores with 10 cores whereas the Core i5-12600 has 6 cores. It also has more threads than the Core i5-12600. In terms of clock speed, the Core i5-12600 and Core i9-7900X are identical in this regard. Despite this, the Core i5-12600 has a slightly higher turbo speed. A Core i5-12600 CPU outputs less heat than a Core i9-7900X CPU because of its significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

Most CPUs have more threads than cores. This technology, colloquially called hyperthreading, improves performance by splitting a core into multiple virtual ones. This provides more efficient utilisation of a core. Indeed, the Core i5-12600 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.