Sources confirm that Intel's 12th Gen Core processor lineup, along with Z690 motherboards, will be available on November 19.

Motherboards with an LGA 1700 processor socket and an Intel Z690 chipset will receive support for two RAM standards at once - DDR5-4800 and DDR4-3200. This contradicts rumors that the older chipset of the new series will only work with DDR5 RAM, while the younger Intel 600 series chipsets will only receive support for DDR4.

Z690-based boards will receive support for the new DMI 4.0 x8 bus, which provides communication between the processor and system logic. It is also known from the new data that Intel has provided several modes of operation for the memory controller built into the Alder Lake-S chips. In the case of high-speed RAM sticks, it will switch to Gear 2 or Gear 4 mode, i.e. its frequency will decrease by two or four times, respectively.

In addition to 16 PCI-E 5.0 lanes and four PCI-E 4.0 lanes powered by the LGA 1700 processor itself, the Intel Z690 chipset will provide support for up to 12 PCI-E 4.0 lanes and up to 16 PCI-E 3.0 lanes. It will also support up to four USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 ports, several dozen slower USB ports, six SATA 6 Gb / s and Wi-Fi 6E / 7 wireless adapters.

As it turned out during the tests, Alder Lake is very demanding on the motherboard power subsystem. Inexpensive motherboards cannot deliver the 135W of power for the long time required for optimal performance from an Alder Lake CPU. The Power Limit 1 of these CPUs is 125 W, but they consume significantly more under load.

Power shortages result in lower frequencies in Boost mode. As a result, the performance of the Core i9-12900K drops by 25-30%, the Core i7-12700K - by 21-25%, the Core i5-12600K - by 7-9%. The experiment showed that for normal operation of top-end Alder Lake CPUs, a motherboard with a power subsystem built according to the "10 + 1 phase" scheme, producing a current of 50 A with DrMOS integrated circuits, is required. Motherboards with 6 + 1 phases are already a bottleneck for system performance.

At $500 the 12900K seems like a serious upgrade.