Intel Core i7-12700 vs Intel Core i9-12900K

Core i7-12700 vs Core i9-12900K comparison

In our benchmarks, the Core i9-12900K beats the Core i7-12700 in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i7-12700 in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core i9-12900K has slightly more cores with 16 cores compared to the Core i7-12700 that has 12 cores. It also has more threads than the Core i7-12700. Our comparison shows that the Core i7-12700 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 i7-12700 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 i7-12700 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.