Core i9-12900HK review: Intel ‘Alder Lake’ laptops crush the competition

It’s hard to believe that CPUs as fast and impressive as AMD’s Ryzen 9 5900HX and Intel’s 11th Core i9-11980HK get their lunches eaten almost across the board by the 12th-gen Core i9-12900HK, but that’s what you just witnessed. Sure, those older CPUs are still relevant and remain quite powerful in their own right, but compared to the 12th-gen “Alder Lake H” flagship—which does almost everything better—they’d be hard to recommend. It’s pretty clear: Intel’s Core i9-12900HK is the new high-performance laptop champion, and it’s not even close.