Intel Unveils 22 More Affordable Alder Lake-S Desktop Chips, New Laminar Coolers

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New Alder Lake SKUs, B660 boards, Coolers and benchmarks revealed

Intel’s CES 2022 keynote found the company introducing the remaining 22 Alder Lake-S chips that will round out its lineup for desktop PCs as it looks to solidify its position at the top of the Best CPU for gaming lists. The company also announced that the more affordable H670, B660 and H610 chipsets would come to market soon, helping to address the high platform pricing associated with the pricier Z690 motherboards.

Intel also shared details about its new Laminar lineup of stock coolers that come bundled with its non-K SKUs. These new coolers appear to add plenty of new cooling capabilities in tandem with some RGB bling, both of which are sorely needed to compete with AMD’s historically excellent Ryzen stock coolers. Let’s dive in.

Intel Alder Lake-S Specifications and Pricing

Here we can see Intel’s 22 new 65W and 35W chips that complement the three Alder Lake models (Core i9-12900K, Core i7-12700K, and Core i5-12600K) already on the market. As before, most of these chips come in two variants — one full-fledged SKU with graphics and a graphics-less F-series model that comes with a discount. These chips all follow the same basic principles as the K-series SKUs and support additives like DDR4-3200 and DDR5-4800 memory, along with the PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 interface. You can read more about the architecture and all of its features in our Alder Lake overview. 

All of these new chips feature locked multipliers, meaning they aren’t overclockable. Still, Intel’s new policy of allowing memory overclocking on all of its chips means you can eke out impressive gains with a minimum of fuss. In fact, we recently displayed just that in our Core i5-12400 review that we posted ahead of the official chip launch today.

Speaking of which, the six-core 12-thread Core i5-12400 stands out as the go-to chip for gamers with its excellent blend of performance for a mere $192. This chip comes without E-cores, meaning it doesn’t have the hybrid x86 architecture as we see in many of the Alder Lake chips, but that doesn’t hamper its competitiveness in its price range. In fact, our review shows that this chip matches the gaming performance of the previous-gen $549 flagship Core i9-11900K and even beats AMD’s $300 Ryzen 5 5600X, setting a new bar for mainstream gaming processors.

The Core i5 series is attractive, with prices spanning from $223 Core i5-12600 to the $167 Core i5-12400, but the latter chip is the real standout in this price range if you plan on gaming with a discrete GPU. Stepping up to the higher-end 12500 or 12600 provides a step forward to the UHD Graphics 770 engine, so these chips are more attractive for pre-built systems or if you don’t plan on using a discrete GPU.

The higher-end $489 Core i9-12900 and $339 Core i7-12700 models are almost identical to their K-series counterparts, so they come with varying numbers of E-cores, but they also have lower clock speeds to stay within the lower 65W PBP/TDP rating. That’s a significant reduction from the K-series’ 125W rating. In addition, Intel also reduced the Maximum Turbo Power (MTP) on the Core i9 and i7 models by 39W and 10W, respectively. Naturally, these power consumption alterations result in less performance, but it also provides a cooler system and friendlier price tag than the K-series chips.
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