Intel Core i7-6700K vs Intel Core i5-12600

Core i7-6700K vs Core i5-12600 benchmarks

In our benchmarks, the Core i5-12600 beats the Core i7-6700K in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i7-6700K in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core i5-12600 has significantly more cores with 6 cores compared to the Core i7-6700K that has 4 cores. It also has more threads than the Core i7-6700K. These CPUs have different clock speeds. Indeed, the Core i7-6700K has a slightly higher clock speed compared to the Core i5-12600. Despite this, the Core i5-12600 has a slightly higher turbo speed. The Core i5-12600 outputs less heat than Core i7-6700K thanks to a significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

The more cores a CPU has, the better the overall performance will be in parallel workloads such as multitasking. Many CPUs have more threads than cores, this means that each physical core is split into multiple logical cores, making them more efficient. Indeed, the Core i7-6700K has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.