Intel at CES 2022 finally took the wraps off of the full suite of its 12th-gen Alder Lake desktop processors from Pentium on up to Core i9 SKUs.
In total, Intel announced 22 new SKUs ranging from 35 to 65W chips to go along with three chipsets for more budget-friendly motherboards than the flagship Z690 available today.
The chipsets — the H670, B660, and H610 — support both DDR5 or DDR4 flavours from the top to the bottom of the stack, but if you want to overclock your processor, you will need a Z690 motherboard. Memory overclocking is possible on the H670 and B660 but not the H610, so just know saving some cash means being stuck with default memory speeds.
What you don’t miss out on is support for either DDR5 or DDR4 depending on the component. This faster RAM upgrade is supported on all 12th-gen Alder Lake desktop SKUs, even the lowly Celeron G6900T.
When it comes to connectivity, the Z690 is predictably the best equipped, however, the H670 is no slouch, offering 14 USB 2.0 ports, a pair of USB 3.2 (20 Gbps ports), four USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) ports, and eight USB 3.2 (5 Gbps) inputs. Only the H610 doesn’t support 20 Gbps USB 3.2 ports.
DMI connections were doubled with the top models supporting x8 DMI 4.0 while the two more budget-friendly support x4 DMI 4.0. Similarly, storage options are split into two groups, with the Z690 and H670 supporting up to eight SATA III ports while the B660 and H610 are limited to four.
These boards will pair with one of the newly released processors. I won’t list the nearly two dozen 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake SKUs that join the three “hero” chips, the Core i9-12900K, i7-12700K, and i5-12600K, to their respective categories. Instead, I’ll direct you to the table below where you can see a rundown of each of these chips and their specs.
Intel didn’t provide any benchmarks beyond those for the Core i9-12900 and Core i5-12600 it revealed last year. We’ll conduct our own tests once we start getting these chips into our office.
As part of its announcement, Intel took the wraps off three stock coolers. Paired with Core i9 CPUs is the Laminar RH1 with RGB lighting and a larger copper heat column. The rest of the Core lineup is cooled by a Laminar RM1 Cooler while Pentium and Celeron chips are paired with the Laminar RS1.