The Core i9-12900K is already on sale in China

While waiting for Intel to launch its 12th generation Alder Lake processors, Chinese merchants (as reported by Yuuki_AnS) are already selling engineering samples on Taobao. As we are approaching the rumored launch date of November 4th (previously it was November 19th), sellers are probably taking the opportunity to get rid of the illegal samples. Vendor Taobao has advertised Core i9-12900K samples as ES2 chips, which means that the specs of these are not very close to the final retail versions and likely contain some bugs.

Credit: TaoBao We already know that Alder Lake's flagship model manages 16 cores in total, consisting of eight Golden Cove and eight Gracemont. The product page states a clock speed between 4 and 5 GHz, which is in line with the leaked specifications. It appears that the Core i9-12900K will have a base clock of 3.2GHz and a boost clock of 5.3GHz, as well as a 30MB L3 cache. The chip will obviously fit into the new LGA1700 socket and will offer support for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 technologies. When it comes to performance, the Core i9-12900K, if early benchmarks are to be trusted, will struggle to beat the Core i9-11900K (Rocket Lake) processor in some workloads, while in others it should fare much better. br>
It's not the first time we've seen the Core i9-12900K on sale in China. A previous dealer had released Core i9-12900K qualification samples for $ 1,250. This Taobao vendor, on the other hand, is only asking $ 700 for its ES2 processors. Furthermore, qualification samples are closer to definitive ones than engineering samples. For comparison, one particular US retailer listed the Core i9-12900K at $ 604.89, so shelling out even $ 700 for an ES2 processor doesn't seem like a bad deal.

Credit: TaoBao There is currently no point in buying any Alder Lake chips as there are no motherboards available to house these hybrid processors. Surprisingly, Intel 600 series motherboards are not even for sale on the Chinese black market.