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Intel Alder Lake i3-12100F, i5-12400F, and i7-12700F specs leak ahead of CES 2022

Intel is set to release new Alder Lake CPUs for budget gaming PCs, which should be formally announced at CES 2022 in January.

A 3D render of an Intel Alder Lake processor

Intel Alder Lake processors may rank among the best gaming CPUs you can buy right now, but their industry leading performance and support for DDR5 gaming RAM comes at a premium cost. Thankfully, leaked promotional materials indicate that team blue will soon add more budget-oriented chips to its 12th generation Core lineup.

According to Videocardz, we can expect Intel to announce and release three new processors: the Core i3-1200F, i5-12400F, and i7-12700F. While the i7 retains the mix of performance and efficiency cores seen on previous Alder Lake CPUs, the i5 and i3 chips only feature performance cores, returning to a more traditional homogeneous design.

So, in terms of core count, the i7-12700F will allegedly feature 12(8P+4E) cores and 20 threads, with a max clock speed of 4.9GHz. Meanwhile, the i5-12400F will boost up to 4.4GHz with six cores and 12 threads, and the i3-12100F isn’t too far behind at 4.3GHz with four cores and eight threads.

While we don’t have any confirmed performance metrics for any of these chips, previous reports indicate that at least one of Intel’s i3 processors trades blows with AMD’s Ryzen 5000 CPUs in single-threaded benchmarks. However, it’s unclear whether these tests were conducted with the new ‘Laminar’ stock air coolers or an AIO water cooler.

It’s worth bearing in mind that you won’t be able to overclock the i7-12700F, like the existing i7-12700K/i7-12700KF, and also need to pair a discrete GPU with any of the three upcoming chips, as none of them will feature integrated graphics. Regardless, we can expect Intel to officially reveal these CPUs at their CES 2022 press conference.