Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake performs well with DDR5, but the price of DDR5 is skyrocketing

Intel’s 12th Generation “Alder Lake” CPUs are a well-rounded new desktop processor range that pleased us in a variety of ways, including the quirky but powerful heterogeneous multi-core technology and next-generation I/O, such as DDR5 memory and PCI-Express Gen 5. Intel allows you to connect these CPUs with either DDR5 or older DDR4 memory and has made sure that there are plenty of motherboard alternatives for both memory types.

The new DDR5 memory comes with the customary early-adopter fee, and memory module costs vary greatly, mostly dependent on frequency. A single 16 GB DDR5-4800 module costs roughly $120, however, overclocked modules, such as DDR5-5200 and DDR5-6000 or more, can cost double or even treble that.

Granted, they are just for a certain audience, but we’re interested in how much performance you “lose” by staying with DDR5-4800, which Intel deems the standard for “Alder Lake” memory controllers.

Another issue we had throughout our testing was what would happen if we fell below DDR5-4800.  Because “Alder Lake” permits on-the-fly memory overclocking from within Windows with Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU), we collected data for a variety of DDR5 frequency and latency combinations, including a handful of low-frequency setups to compare with DDR4.

The DDR4-3600 configuration used in this evaluation operates in “Gear 1” mode for synchronicity between the memory controller command frequency and DRAM clock, whereas DDR5 is implicitly Gear 2 across the board—a 1:2 division between the command frequency and DRAM clock. In this article, we look at how the performance of the Core i9-12900K scales over a variety of DDR5 rates, as well as a common DDR4 frequency for good measure.

Alder Lake Specs

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