Alder Lake

[LordFlathead]

So having been firmly planted in the AMD camp for three years since Intel's previously lacklustre performance, especially in the thermal department, I again find myself looking at the soon to be released Alder Lake offerings which look fairly promising - well on paper at least.

No surprise is the fact you will need a new motherboard for the new socket and the board OEM's are also stating DDR5 is the way to go. I'm always interested in new memory architecture as high clock speeds with fast, low latency RAM makes the PC experience very snappy.

I'm currently running two machines at home, both gen 1 Threadrippers and they are absolutely faultless but having swapped into a 4k gaming projector, my RTX3090 is bottlenecking due to the average clock speeds. The perfect excuse to upgrade if ever I needed one!

Now that AMD has been consistently churning out good gaming and workstation chips I'm quite happy to stuff a 570x board in there and an offering from the Ryzen 9 series but I have missed 5GHz plus speeds since being in bed with AMD. So all in all this looks like Intel could be back in the running if the 12900 is as good as they claim. Ryzen 4 is also bookmarked for early next year so once again the goalposts will move.

There is only one thing which niggles me.. the embargo for reviews and testing just happens to be the release date of the product - which is the 4th November. Why would you not allow people to publish tests until the release date? Whole thing sounds like they are covering something up and historically most OEM system builders release the reviews that bring in the revenue so this doesn't inspire confidence. Also Intel's claim of greater performance is listed using Windows 11. it is common knowledge that AMD was not optimised for it as both Intel and Microsoft developed the performance matrices between them.

Decisions decisions!

[mmm-five]

Maybe wait a week?

Although I suppose it depends on what value you put on a couple of hundred extra GHz vs double the power usage of Intel vs AMD...and whether you'd even notice it in your workflow vs a new 5850X or Threadripper.

I'm just staying away from Intel due to their history of over-promising and under-delivering (except in 'lab conditions').

[FourWheelDrift]

LordFlathead said:

Now that AMD has been consistently churning out good gaming and workstation chips I'm quite happy to stuff a 570x board in there and an offering from the Ryzen 9 series but I have missed 5GHz plus speeds since being in bed with AMD.

Speed isn't everything.

[FourWheelDrift]

Prices - https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/ald...

[Harpoon]

I'm still running an i5-2500K and was thinking of an upgrade. The i5-12600KF looks interesting for the money but need to see some benchmarks. I'd also expect there to be a lag in applications perhaps making the best use of two core types.

[bazza white]

Is ddr5 availability going to be an issue?


interesting to see how they perform though.

[FourWheelDrift]

Considering Alder Lake Z690 motherboards are also going to come in DDR4 variants as well I think there's no rush to go headlong DDR5 just yet, not unless you're happy to be paying the early adopter premium. DDR5 boards are going to be £100+ more than DDR4 boards.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gigabyte-z690-al...

[xeny]

Harpoon said:

I'd also expect there to be a lag in applications perhaps making the best use of two core types.

In theory, as long as you're running Windows 11, applications shouldn't care that much.

The nastiest issue I can see is the one Ian Cutress identifies towards the end of https://www.anandtech.com/show/16959/intel-innovat... and that looks to be largely beyond application control. It is also similar to what I've heard about behaviour of M1 Macs with little and large cores.

[LordFlathead]

mmm-five said:

Maybe wait a week?

Although I suppose it depends on what value you put on a couple of hundred extra GHz vs double the power usage of Intel vs AMD...and whether you'd even notice it in your workflow vs a new 5850X or Threadripper.

I'm just staying away from Intel due to their history of over-promising and under-delivering (except in 'lab conditions').

This is where I'm at presently. I think this is going to be another overhyped launch but I would like it if they brought out a competitive product at a competitive price. I went right off Intel when their desktop enthusiast CPU's were north of £1500. That is server chip territory.

FourWheelDrift said:

Speed isn't everything.

I watched that and Linus does have a point. However I enjoy overclocking and haven't been able to see the high frequency counts that I used to get in my previous overclocked rigs. We used to get phase-change machines with compound cooling running Celeron 400A's into the 500's back in the day. Even though the overclocks don't provide much in terms of performance gain.. they look good in a custom on a custom board with display showing the frequency. I've not built a proper games machine (for my customers) for over 5 years now, so having more time is a great excuse to build something special.

I've already got a case sitting there doing nothing, never opened it! (https://youtu.be/rPCtdzwcCLs)

FourWheelDrift said:

Prices - https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/ald...

Hence this post Tempting but why the testing/reviewing embargo until the chip is for sale.

So now the decision simply is: Buy now and take a chance or wait forever for stock to come back in after the scalpers have raised the price by 100%.

Personally, I think the I7-12700K @ £389 is particularly good value for money but Overcrunchers as linked are already scalping at their advertised price of £419.

To scalp or not to scalp that is the question

[FourWheelDrift]

Alder Lake is confusing some DRM in games (that are no longer being patched/updated) apparently.

[LordFlathead]

Slightly off topic but this Linus review of DDR5 may answer some questions

https://youtu.be/aJEq7H4Wf6U

[xeny]

LordFlathead said:

I watched that and Linus does have a point. However I enjoy overclocking and haven't been able to see the high frequency counts that I used to get in my previous overclocked rigs.

I don't think there's going to be significant overclocking (other than the trivial 100MHz the Intel overclocking app allows) any more. There's too much competition between Intel and AMD for them to leave any easily accessible Hz on the table, and the lower core count chips already have higher base clocks than the bigger ones to take advantage of that extra thermal headroom.

[LordFlathead]

Here we go! Jumped on the bandwagon and waiting for parts to arrive.

Here's a couple of reviews today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhI9tLOg-6I

https://youtu.be/-EogHCFd7w0

Edited by LordFlathead on Thursday 4th November 16:21

[8bit]

I was about to order a 12600K, board and RAM, then saw the price of DDR5 RAM Wondering how long that'll take to calm down, anyone got any idea?

[FourWheelDrift]

Basically no performance difference between using Alder Lake with DDR5 against DDR4 - https://youtu.be/WWsMYHHC6j4?t=1024

[8bit]

FourWheelDrift said:

Basically no performance difference between using Alder Lake with DDR5 against DDR4 - https://youtu.be/WWsMYHHC6j4?t=1024

Not yet but I don't want to have to replace my motherboard in a couple of years just to upgrade RAM.

[130R]

I'm not going to be buying one and I've only seen the LTT review but the 12600K seems good. 12900K looks like it needs a custom loop for heavy workloads (not gaming)

[8bit]

FourWheelDrift said:

Basically no performance difference between using Alder Lake with DDR5 against DDR4 - https://youtu.be/WWsMYHHC6j4?t=1024

Did a little more digging, found this:

https://youtu.be/fhI9tLOg-6I?t=753

Besides gaming the main thing I do with my PC is photo editing with Photoshop and Lightroom so looks like DDR5 maybe makes a tad more sense there. I priced up two versions of my intended build, the DDR5 version comes in about £100 more expensive than DDR4, I can probably just about rationalise that in my head now on the above basis.

[LordFlathead]

8bit said:

FourWheelDrift said:

Basically no performance difference between using Alder Lake with DDR5 against DDR4 - https://youtu.be/WWsMYHHC6j4?t=1024

Did a little more digging, found this:

https://youtu.be/fhI9tLOg-6I?t=753

Besides gaming the main thing I do with my PC is photo editing with Photoshop and Lightroom so looks like DDR5 maybe makes a tad more sense there. I priced up two versions of my intended build, the DDR5 version comes in about £100 more expensive than DDR4, I can probably just about rationalise that in my head now on the above basis.

DDR5 has loads of bandwidth compared to DDR4 and this is already showing its benefit with Photoshop and modelling software. I think there may be little difference now between 4 and 5 but who wants to fork out for another MB again when DDR5 becomes faster and more affordable?

Z690 boards are not cheap but my trusty old PC's have been working flawlessly since Threadripper 1 so it makes no sense to go with a 2 year old Zen 3 architecture.

My RAM arrived today. 32GB of ADATA XPG Lancer 16GB x2, DDR5, 5200MHz (PC5-41600), CL38, 1.25V, ECC, XMP 3.0, PMI

DDR5 It's odd as it is gaming /enthusiast RAM yet it all is ECC, which apparently is done in real time. Reviews look good from several sources.

https://www.overclockers.com/xpg-lancer-ddr5-5200-...

In this review they say that a marginal overclock is faster than any current DDR4 and this is the early adopters "crap" which will no doubt improve with time and development.

Slowly the pieces of my puzzle are arriving. CPU comes tomorrow along with a much hard to source AIO. I will be running custom loops once blocks are available but currently they are unobtainium. Motherboard should arrive Saturday. Then it's just down to a PSU and then finally 4 sticks of Seagate Firecuder and that will do.

Overclockers have an informative thread which has been growing around 70 pages a day for the last 3, all the tests and reviews are their along with a healthy dose of speculation which is always the case at product launches - this CPU is special as it a new architecture and everything about it (small cores and big cores) are completely adjustable including individual voltages.

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/alder-la...

The only negative about this build is I really wanted to run Sli but there is little point as the support is not there. I'm excited about it all

[TheBinarySheep]

Looks like it needs the cooling from a Nuclear reactor to keep temps down, and my god how much power does it draw at full load.

All things considered, the AMD chips still seem a better all round proposition, but I guess if you're after maximum power and don't care about energy consumption then Intel wins.