Intel i5-12600K vs i5-6600K Gaming & Productivity – Alder Lake vs Skylake

Back in late 2015, if you wanted a mid range CPU for your new gaming PC, the i5-6600K was a pretty clear choice. Sporting the then brand-new DDR4 memory, a freshly shrunken process node, and a reasonable enough price tag, it was somewhat the go-to chip (even if the previous generation 4670K wasn’t exactly miles slower). AMD was launching their third generation of FX CPUs based on their Piledriver architecture, which was fine but far from truly competitive.

Fast forward 7 years and we finally have another process node shrink, a major core design change, a major architecture shift in fact, and actually support for both DDR4 and the new-fangled DDR5! The 12600K actually boasts a specific, yet impressive claim, which is that the 4 efficiency cores it contains should be as fast if not faster than the 4 Skylake cores in the 6600K, all while drawing significantly less power. That’s an impressive claim, especially considering the 12600K has a further 6 hyperthreaded performance cores too.

I’m really interested to see how the 6600K holds up against its much younger great-great-great-great-grandchild, the 12600K. Let’s start with the gaming results, I’m testing at 1080p at what I think are realistic settings for each game – generally around medium to high – and I’m testing with an RTX 3060 as that’s a pretty reasonable choice for either of these chips.

Starting off with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, as I found in my previous video comparing three generations of ‘400’ series i5’s, the newer CPUs like the 12600K and Ryzen 5600X performed functionally identically, with only the 10400F lagging slightly behind the rest. The 6600K though? Yeah that took a hit. Of course, 96 FPS average is still plenty to play the game so it’s no real issue but compared to the much newer 12600K which is hitting just shy of 150 FPS average, that’s a sizable gap. What’s also interesting is to look at the CPU Render performance, where all of the other chips exceed their average FPS by a considerable amount, except the 6600K.

Microsoft Flight is the same story, a sizable and noticeable drop in performance using the older i5, albeit still far from unplayable at just shy of 80 FPS average. You do have to make sure nothing else is running in the background though, as those just 4 cores and 4 threads are stretched thin here.

No game can show that quite as well as CSGO, where there was an appreciable difference in the gaming experience on the 6600K. It nets just 151 FPS average, which on the face of it is still absolutely fine, but more importantly the 1% lows dip to just 72 FPS and I can tell you from my experience playing it, it was stuttering like mad. It wasn’t unplayable or anything, but it was a less-than-perfect experience for sure.

Cyberpunk has a similar trend, with a lower but not impossible average, and a starkly lower 1% low figure that’s a clear indication of a bottleneck. Again, still not impossible to play, but can be a touch frustrating at times.

Fortnite actually did pretty well – again there was a little bit of hitching and stuttering but on the whole was playable with a relatively close 123 FPS average and 63 FPS in the 1% lows. A fair dip from the next lowest at 144 FPS average and 103 FPS in the 1% lows, but not too bad.

Finally in Watchdogs Legion, this takes the Cyberpunk approach but even more drastic on the average performance, netting less than half of the 12600K’s average and almost a third of its 1% low performance too! Again, while still playable for sure, you go from having a smooth, responsive and easy-to-enjoy experience on any of the other chips, to a choppier, more sluggish time on the 6600K.

So, with an RTX 3060 at 1080p anyway, the 6600K can offer usable, if a little lacklustre performance in most titles. It’s still perfectly fine, but is clearly showing its age and an upgrade to even a 10400F would offer a sizable performance leap with this class of GPU. But, if you thought the gaming results were rough, you won’t believe these…

In the single threaded test in Cinebench R23, the 12600K offers just shy of TWICE AS MUCH PERFORMANCE! TWICE! That’s pretty crazy, and I think goes a long way to explaining at least part of that gaming performance advantage. It’s worth noting that the 10400F is considerably slower single-core than the 10600K that I sadly don’t have access to, hence its proximity to the older 6600K. The real kicker though is multi-threaded. The 12600K is just shy of FIVE TIMES FASTER! A combination of both faster single threaded performance and more cores means you get lightyears more out of the new chip. Hell even the 12400F is 2.5x faster, albeit with 6 cores and 12 threads at its disposal.

In Blender you can expect the same multiple-orders-of-magnitude performance improvement, with the 6600K taking 11 minutes to render the BMW scene, versus the 12600K at just shy of 2 and a half minutes. The gooseberry scene is even worse of the 6th gen chip, taking nearly a full hour to render a single frame compared to just under 13 minutes on the 12th gen chip.

That limitation continues in the Adobe CC suite as Puget Bench shows well – in Premiere the 6600K scores at nearly two and a half times lower than the 12600K and a football field behind the rest of the pack too. After effects is a little closer, just half the score of the 12600K instead and a little tighter grouped overall. And in Photoshop the cap closes a little more, with the 12600K offering ‘just’ an 86% higher score than the 6600K.

Interestingly though, even looking at the chip’s rated power limits, you’ll notice the 12600K is the highest here at up to 150W sustained indefinitely, versus the 95W, 96 second limit on the 6600K. Only the Ryzen 5600X beats that with its 76W package power limit cap.

What’s equally interesting for me is to take a peek at the E core performance on its own, and yep in Cinebench R23 single threaded the 12600K’s 4 E cores offer near identical performance to the 4 Skylake cores in the 6600K. Same for multi-threaded, in fact the E cores seem to have a slight advantage there, all while drawing around 36W all core instead of around 47W.

So it’s clear Intel has come a long way in 7 years. The 12600K – hell even the simpler 12400F – offer significantly more performance across the board. If you’ve managed to find a GPU, especially now prices seem to be coming down and stock is generally available, and have held on to your 6600K, you might want to consider an upgrade to something like the 12600K. Personally I think the 12400F is the best bang-for-buck on the Intel side right now, although I should note that the lower your graphics power, the less your CPU will be a bottleneck, so if you are still rocking a 1060 or 1070 like a whole lot of people, a CPU upgrade is definitely less important for gaming.