12th Gen Intel Core i7 12700H H-Series CPU Review

MSI Ge66 Raider Intel 12700H

Earlier this year during CES, Intel launched their 12th Gen Mobile CPU’s, further expanding on their Alder Lake lineup. One of the key products was the H-series chips mainly for high-end performance laptops. The CPU’s were touted to be ridiculously fast, and focused on Intel’s Hybrid Performance Architecture. Manufactured using the new “Intel 7” process or 10nm Enhanced SuperFin (ESF), each 10nm node promised up to 15% higher performance per node compared to its previous iterations. Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake H-series CPU’s run on a base power of 45W with up to 115W for their entire lineup, thus enabling the need for some sort of balance.

In addition, these new CPU’s brings together two types of specialized cores (Performance Cores and Efficiency Cores) to bring overall faster performance especially in different user scenarios. This type of performance gain has been one of the key focus of Intel throughout the past year, aiming to balance power draw in multiple environments while bridging the latest technologies. These new features that the 12th Gen Alder Lake-H series CPU’s support include DDR5 memory, Thunderbolt 4 connectivity, and Intel Wi-FI 6E.

We’ve reviewed Intel’s previous-generation Tiger Lake Mobile CPU before, and while these also carried almost similar technologies, all we can say is that this current iteration is really just ridiculously more polished and has a more seamless overall user experience – regardless for gaming, content creation, or light use. It’s quite interesting that Intel has focused more on the separation of cores,

For this review we explore the power of the 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake H-Series CPU, specifically the Intel Core i7-12700H, in the MSI [VLG1] Raider GE66-12UGS Gaming Laptop.

Quick H-Series Comparison: 12700H is Bang for the Buck?

Currently, Intel has implemented the H-series branding to a total 8 CPU’s, ranging from i9 to i5 iterations. As you can see, the i7-12700H shares the same specs as its higher-end brothers: 14 cores, 20 threads, 6 performance and 8 efficient cores and L3 cache, which does make it probably the most interesting choice in this segment. It is expected that for most of the higher-end laptops in this category, the Intel Core i7-12700H would probably be most used option for manufacturers this year.

Taking a little step back, in the 12th Gen CPU family, the H-series processors are the highest-end of the bunch, with the P-series for thin and light laptops, and U-series for ultraportables. Intel also launched their higher-end HX-series CPU’s last May for workstations and gaming laptops, which are even higher than the H-series. However, it’s expected that currently, the H-series will reign for most low-end up to high-end laptops which will be available in the market, at least until Intel’s 13th gen series comes out late this year, but this is still a bit far away as of this moment.

Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake Key Improvements

On a power to performance ratio, Intel claims that its on a much higher relative performance compared to Apple’s M1 Max CPU or the Ryzen 5900HX. Intel made it a point to really push out the potential of the 10nm process to squeeze maximum power from the cores. All in all, it really is a generational leap compared to the previous 11th gen mobile CPU’s.

TEST DEVICE: MSI Raider GE66-12UGS

The MSI Raider GE66 is one of the laptops that utilizes the Intel Core i7-12700H CPU. Built with MSI’s distinct gaming style, it has a solid overall gaming package that’s truly built for gamers on the go. It also has the latest specs to match with its great performance.

Specifications:

  • Processor : Intel® Core™ i7-12700H processor
    • 14-Core (6 P-Cores, 8 E-cores), 20 Threads
    • Max turbo: 4.70Ghz
    • Cache: 24 MB Intel® Smart Cache
    • Base Power: 45W
    • Max Turbo Power: 115W
  • OS : Windows 11 Home 64bit
  • Memory : 32GB DDR5 4800 (16GB*2 4800MHz), Max 64GB
  • Storage : 1TB M.2 NVMe™ PCIe® 3.0 SSD, 2x M.2 SSD slot (NVMe PCIe Gen4)
  • Display: 15.6″ Full HD (1920×1080), 360 Hz Refresh Rate, IPS-Level panel
  • Graphics : RTX™ 3070 Ti
  • Connectivity:  Killer Gb LAN (Up to 2.5G) Intel® Killer™ AX Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth 5.2
  • Ports:
    • 1x Type-C (USB3.2 Gen2 / DP)
    • 1x Type-C (USB / DP / Thunderbolt™ 4)
    • 2x Type-A USB3.2 Gen1
    • 1x Type-A USB3.2 Gen2
    • 1x RJ45
    • 1x SD Express Card Reader
    • 1x (8K @ 60Hz / 4K @ 120Hz) HDMI
    • 1x Mini-DisplayPort
  • Keyboard: Per-Key RGB Backlight Keyboard
  • Webcam: FHD type (30fps@1080p)
  • Audio: 2x 2W Speaker
  • Battery: 4-Cell, 99.9 Battery (Whr)
  • Dimensions: 358 x 267 x 23.4 mm
  • Weight: 2.38 kg

We tested Intel’s latest CPU using this laptop to see how well the Intel Core i7-12700H CPU performs.

Performance and Benchmarks

For testing, we used multiple benchmarking tools. Some performance comparison below might be coming from our test result for Intel’s Tiger Lake Core i7-11800H CPU, which does come from a different manufacturer as well as also a different GPU, so do take some of the comparison results with a grain of salt.

3DMARK

3DMark’s latest CPU Profile highlights how the CPU performance scales and changes with the number of cores and threads used – first max threads (20 threads for this particular CPU), then 16, 8, 4, 2, until 1 thread is used.

While most CPU’s now aim for more cores, which means that more work can be performed at the same time, it’s also important to see thread performance – how each core can run multiple threads. Generally speaking, the more threads, the greater the amount of work that can be done.

For this test scores it can be seen that the Intel Core i7-12700H, with the MSI Raider GE66, had median scores that almost hit the overclocking potential of the CPU. It’s also particularly strong in the 4-8 threads, where most AAA gaming would be. However, one thing we couldn’t figure is its general performance in multithreaded counts, where it’s slightly lower than our previous tests using the Intel Core i7-11800H, despite running the benchmark a couple of times at max performance and thermal settings.

Compared to our previous-generation CPU which is the Intel Core i7-11800H, there was a whopping average of 42% difference across all scores for Time Spy and Firestrike benchmarks. Although these scores were also coming from very different laptops and also different GPU’s, let’s take a quick look on the physics/CPU scores for these two:

Removing the graphics performance in the comparison, consistently, there was an average of 47% difference across all scores for Time Spy and Firestrike – even a higher % to the comparison of the overall scores for the two different CPU’s! The scores aren’t close, and there definitely is a significant leap in terms of overall computing performance.

Cinebench

Cinebench is benchmarking tool for measuring CPU single-core and multi-core performance. We used both Cinebench R20 and R23 releases to benchmark the Intel Core i7-11700H, and results were at par with expectation. R23 has the capability to more accurately measure modern and next-generation CPU’s. According to our testing result, multi-core score reached 16256 pts and single core score is 1761 pts, both of which puts it above the intel Core i7-1165G7. It’s also more than 40% higher than our previous Intel Core i7-11800H score, which was 10547 / 1201.

Gaming

For the gaming tests, we used different settings for the different games, depending on which visually looks more appealing. We also didn’t want to sacrifice graphic quality just for the sake of fast FPS. We made it a point to set the settings at least great-looking but not too far off in terms of FPS. Again, the goal is for it to almost 60FPS or a little bit higher than it.

Most of these games, particularly Cyberpunk, Red Dead Redemption, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, were also pretty CPU intensive aside from GPU intensive. There’s basically a lot going on within the game itself aside from the graphics.

Overall the Intel Core i7-12700H performed very well and has a little over 15% difference in terms of performance versus our previous test of the 11800H. However, the previous tests also ran on an RTX3060 (non-TI), so there is A LOT of potential factors that might have affected it. What we can definitely conclude is that the 12700H by itself is by no means affecting any issues of bottlenecking for the system, and can definitely most of the gaming load.

Conclusion

Intel’s 12th Gen Core i7-12700H Alder Lake-H CPU is a no-nonsense processor, capable of performing leaps and bounds more compared to its predecessors. With the addition of Intel’s Hybrid Architecture and introduction of P-Cores (performance) and E-Cores (efficiency), background tasks can now be handled more efficiently. It’s slightly interesting that Intel opted to add slower cores (E-Cores) instead of more faster cores all together, but it’s likely that the E-cores were made to provide better overall performance at less power while keeping energy consumption low. Nevertheless, Intel still added more power to the P-cores and more number of threads to each of them, so it’s definitely still no slouch when using the CPU for higher-thread or higher performance tasks like gaming or content creation.

The MSI Raider GE66 can be purchased from Intel Philippines’ Official Resellers: Abenson, Electroworld, Gigahertz, Octagon, PC Express, Silicon Valley, and Villman; and the MSI Official Concept Stores and Ecommerce Stores

the 12th Gen Intel® Core™ powered laptops are available in Acer, Asus, and Lenovo models

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