Intel Core i7-12700K vs Intel Xeon E5-2696 v3

Core i7-12700K vs Xeon E5-2696 v3 comparison

In our benchmarks, the Core i7-12700K beats the Xeon E5-2696 v3 in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Xeon E5-2696 v3 in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Xeon E5-2696 v3 has significantly more cores with 18 cores compared to the Core i7-12700K that has 12 cores. It also has more threads than the Core i7-12700K. The Xeon E5-2696 v3 outputs less heat than Core i7-12700K thanks to a slightly 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 i7-12700K has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.