When news of a new product launch is heard, people’s attention is naturally drawn to it. However, as seen in the recently released Galaxy Z Fold series, it is common for companies to focus on flagship models for most of their new product announcements.
Although it appears to display industry-leading technology, models for mainstream consumers, which occupy the absolute majority of the market, are often quietly released without knowing whether they came out until age after waiting a long time after the leading.
It’s easy to feel that it’s a bit old-fashioned to use the current mainstream model as it is with a high eye for a new flagship. When facing the so-called ‘pump’, why not fill the gap with overclocking if upgrading to a flagship position is cumbersome and a shame to wait for a new mainstream?
■ Core i5-12600KF to publish Elder Lake Big-Little
As many of you already know, one of the main features of Intel 12th Generation Core CPU Elder Lake is the small big architecture adopted for mobile platforms, and Intel divides them into P-core and E-core, Core i5-12600K (F ) It was applied from the model.
If you know a little about Intel CPU features, you would know that the K version is not a bundled cooler because it is a model built on the premise of overclocking. The CPU got cooled using the LC240 ARGB Daewon CTS.
Overclocking was done using Intel eXtreme Tuning Utility (XTU), which allows you to easily adjust CPU options in Windows. XTU incorporates an ISO (Intel Speed Optimizer) function that automatically performs Elder Lake overclocking. First of all, since overclocking through ISO, the P-core all-core boost clock from 4.5 GHz to 4.7GHz, and the E -core is 3.7GHz The speed has been upgraded to 3.9GHz. At this time, the maximum boost clock of 2 cores of the P core was maintained at 4.9GHz, and the core voltage was increased by 0.025V to ensure stability during overclocking.
Even on its own, you can expect better performance than the original state, but by raising the all-core boost clock further, the P-core has been raised to 5GHz and the E-core to 4GHz. At this point, the voltage was increased by 0.1V to compensate for the increased clock.
For information, the overclock limit value may vary depending on the product, motherboard, BIOS version, etc., even with the same model CPU, so please refer to the overclocking achievement figures and settings in this test only.
■ Core i5-12600KF overclocked to P-Core 5GHz and E-Core 4GHz
In order to confirm the degree of performance improvement of the Core i5-12600KF overclock, we first ran the PCMark10 test. PCMark10 is a program for checking the performance of daily PC tasks such as program execution time, video chat, web browsing, and Office (Word, Spreadsheet).
As it mainly consists of tasks with low multi-threaded usage, the boost clocks of the P-core and the E-core go up to 4.9 GHz and 3.7 GHz in the base state, so it’s a disappointing result to say that it improves significantly compared to the overclocked state.
Still, it’s enough to confirm that overclocking enabled a better overall experience.
The WebXPRT test, which measures the performance of web browser-based tasks such as OCR and web surfing, online classes, photo editing, and web album creation using HTML5 and JavaScript standards, etc. Performance was better when clocking.
In PCMark10, the difference in performance for each test item is about 5% on average, while web surfing performance can achieve more than 10% higher performance based on WebXPRT 3 and Cinebench R23 multi-threaded test. In the single-threaded Cinebench R23 test, the difference in the maximum boost clock was not large, and the difference was only about 2.5%.
The 3DMark CPU profile test was conducted to measure CPU performance by multi-threaded usage in games. As you can guess from the PCMark and Cinebench R23 single-threaded test results above, the performance difference in the 1-threaded and 2-threaded tests was not large because the difference between the boost clock of the Core i5-12600KF and the boost clock of the overclock condition is small.
On the other hand, when the multi-core CPU usage is increased with 4, 8, and 16 threads, the performance difference in the overclocked condition, where the all-core boost clock is significantly higher, increased by 10%. Of course, since this test focuses on CPU performance rather than graphics performance, keep in mind that it may not be reflected in actual game performance.
I checked the effect of overclocking the Core i5-12600KF in real games, but unfortunately the game performance did not improve significantly.
The fact that the graphics card is a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti may also be the cause, but unlike the ‘work’ program which almost always uses the CPU core fully like the Cinebench R23 multi-threaded test, the CPU core usage in games changes often depending on the situation.
This is because even in a game that shows a high level of multi-core usage, the load on the CPU core/thread is not continuously maintained at 100% every second.
As a result, as a result of the game test, even if the performance improvement due to overclocking itself is not great, a more stable gaming experience is possible when overclocking, so trying to overclock is an option to be considered.
■ Overclock core i5-12600KF, enjoy a better experience with the same CPU
Overclocking is a task that has more merits for mainstream users than high-end users.
High-end users, which are almost the best of the current generation products, do not easily experience a lack of performance, and using so much performance means that you can buy so much hardware if you think otherwise.
However, since mainstream users are cautious because it is not easy to bear the burden of buying high-end products that are as expensive as performance, they are likely to be interested in securing additional performance by tuning or overclocking for performance optimization.
There is a premise that you have to put up with the trouble, but the reward is a charm that is hard to give up on the sweetness of returning to a better PC experience.
For this purpose also, overclock the Core i5-12600KF.
