Today, we'll show you the ropes and teach you how to unlock the hidden overclocking performance lurking under the heat spreaders in Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake. That adds a few more variables to the mix, so you'll need to work on finding the right balance for your needs. The chips come with Intel's hybrid architecture that blends groups of big and fast Performance cores (P-cores) with groups of small and powerful Efficiency cores (E-cores), and both run at different clock rates. (i.e., you're not using liquid nitrogen or other sub-zero cooling methods).Īlder Lake does bring a lot of new wrinkles to overclocking, though. Still, all indications point to the Alder Lake chips being exceptional overclockers, even if you're planning on standard ambient cooling. In fact, our overclocking results below show that Intel's Alder Lake chips have far more overclocking headroom than AMD's Ryzen 5000 chips, and that equates to big performance speedups.Īs always, you'll be at the whims of the silicon lottery when it comes to the maximum overclock you can squeeze out of your chip. In fact, we've found that thermals are often the limiting factor to 12th Gen Alder Lake overclockability, meaning that if you're lucky enough to get a good chip, you'll largely be held back by your ability to cool it. However, Intel's Alder Lake chips hit the reset button: The Intel 7 process has far more room for overclocking than prior generations, helping the chips take over our list of Best CPUs for gaming. Yes, the past several generations of Intel's chips slowly lost overclocking headroom as the company folded more of its frequency headroom into stock performance levels while struggling to compete with AMD.

Contrary to innumerable reports of its demise, overclocking is not dead - not by a long shot.

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