AMD Ryzen 5 3600X vs Intel Core i9-12900K

Ryzen 5 3600X vs Core i9-12900K specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the Core i9-12900K beats the Ryzen 5 3600X in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Ryzen 5 3600X in all gaming tests too.

With info from our database, we find that the Core i9-12900K has significantly more cores with 16 cores whereas the Ryzen 5 3600X has 6 cores. It also has more threads than the Ryzen 5 3600X. Our comparison shows that the Ryzen 5 3600X 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 Ryzen 5 3600X 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.

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 Ryzen 5 3600X has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.