Intel i5-12600K vs. AMD Ryzen 5 5600X: specs and performance

It is no secret that most users looking for a gaming PC will go for the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X or the Intel Core i5-12600K, especially for its price and is that all the world cannot afford more powerful processors within the Alder Lake -S and Zen 3 architecture. This is why, due to the general interest aroused by this comparison, we have decided to do it under the same parameters as the other two. We hope you enjoy it and that it helps you choose a new processor for your PC.

AMD Ryzen 5 5600X facing an Intel Core i5-12600K

The i5-12600K and the Ryzen 5 5600X have in common that they have 6 high performance cores in the middle part of the processor. The big difference is that the Intel chip adds 4 less efficient, but more energy efficient cores that are intended for background tasks or that do not require the power of the main cores.

Each of the performance cores supports multithreading and can therefore run two threads simultaneously. This gives the 6 Zen 3 cores of the 5600X 12 threads of execution and also the 6 P-Cores of the i5-12600K. As for E-Cores, they do not support this function, so they only provide 4 additional execution threads, one for each core.

One point in favor of the entry that we can talk about the AMD processor is its greater energy efficiency, since its TDP is 65W compared to Intel’s 125W, so it will need simpler cooling systems. Now what interests us is how each of them works.

Intel i5-12600K frente a 5600X and benchmarks

As with previous Ryzen 5000 vs. Intel Core 12, we are going to extract Cinebench R23 from its single and multi-core benchmarks. The results are visible in the graphs below these lines:

In the single core test, there are no surprises from the rest of the comparisons we made with the two architectures comparing the higher ranges of the two processors. The i5-12600K with 1918 points achieves a 22% better performance in this regard than the 5600X. It’s a shame that we don’t know how E-Cores perform, which we would like to know because a thread can end there.

Regarding multi-core performance, a differential of 56.7% in favor of the Intel processor thanks to its score of 17,660 points, against 11,268 for AMD. As we have already mentioned in the comparison between the i7-12700K and the 5800X, the differential is larger due to the participation of E-Cores in the multi-core test. Although if we are being honest we would like to see the performance of the Intel Core 12 without the E-Cores for a comparison with the equality of the cores in multithreaded, but the processor is not sold without disabling them and we would not compare. not both products.

Which of the two architectures is more efficient?

For this we did a simple exercise, we divided the points obtained in Cinebench R23 by the consumption watts that mark its specifications, 65 in the case of the 5600X and 125 in the case of the i5-12600K. And what do we find? Well, the AMD CPU wins with 24 points per watt in single core against 15 of the i5-12600K, the process which is repeated in the case of the multicore test but with different numbers, since the i5-12600K scores 141 points against 173 AMD and So it’s the Ryzen 5000 that wins in this regard.

Although if we think about it a good measure to compare performance is to see how it performs against clock speed, here we have to reject the multicore test as a benchmark and compare P-Cores against Zen 3 cores. know which architecture is the most efficient at the same clock speed. Of course, benchmarks have an associated trap, which is that they put the processor in Boost or Turbo mode. Our surprise? Both mark 0.34 point in the reference per MHz.

And what about his performance in games?

The tests between the i5-12600K and the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X were performed using a PC with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card with 32 GB of 3800 MHz DDR5 RAM, as other times four games different have been tested and all in Full HD resolution.

As you can see, the results are even a bit ahead in some cases for the Intel Core i5-12600K. It should be taken into account that games are a type of multi-threaded application that has given a lot of thought to how many cores and execution threads they are going to use, so that any processor above the maximum needed will not be used. ‘will not benefit. At the moment, there are hardly any games that take advantage of an 8-core setup, that doesn’t mean that extra cores don’t add up at times and don’t add up at all.

What do the results of this test tell us? Well, the same conclusions we drew in the other two comparisons. There are no games today that make good use of the concept of heterogeneous hearts. We know that proper segregation of duties will be the key in many games in the future and that the Intel processor will start to take advantage of it, otherwise we are leaving out the same recommendation we made with the i7-12700K and 5800X, if you are a user. From an AMD AM4 card compatible with Ryzen 5000 you get much more economically to make the jump to Ryzen 5000 than to Intel, for the rest of the cases we recommend the Intel processor, although if you think that for your pocket, the AMD option then rolls for it.