Pushing Intel® to the MAX

Today we explore how we have engineered our new Intel i7-12700K machines (in testing) to offer performance enhanced machines that are simply ahead of the market curve.

What's the point, surely the 11th gens were fast enough?

Well normally I'd agree with you, but Tempest happens to harbour game(s) that get really core hungry.

RUST, yeah that game with the rock and the naked people running around? Well RustDedicated is largely bound to one or two cores, making single-thread performance the main metric in measuring a server(s) ability to hold larger user populations within the game. You have a low clock speed? - you're going to struggle to hold larger player counts, you have a high clock speed your player counts could theoretically hit the 6/700+ range if you play your cards right.

Other games could also see increase as well, the chip offers a CPU Benchmark of 33,926 (4,039 single-threaded) as well as 12 cores, 20 threads. Intel® architecture also splits those 12 cores up into 8 performance-cores (p-cores) and 4 high efficiency cores.

Oh and one other thing, this CPU (and our board) supports utilisation of up to 128GB of DDR5 Memory, but there will be another post detailing our results on that.

What's the performance increase?

We ran this in our Phoenix location on a test bench for a few days, allowing some of our customers to give the machine a spin and see what damage (aka results) they could pull from it.

These results are just initial tests running under ideal conditions.

Our configuration: CPU: Intel® i7-12700K, RAM: 64GB DDR5 Memory (5600Mhz), Storage: 2x 1TB NVMe Samsung 980 Evo Pros

All of this still maintaining our high capacity 10Gbps server-ports behind our 10Tbit/s+ network with our stateful filtering.

Due to the nature of the customers we expect to be interested in these machines, all tests were performed in a way where the results are comparative to some of our other Intel® builds popular with our Rust community.

Okay, okay... you want to see the results.

Benchmarking Results

• We saw (on average) a 40% increase over the Intel 11th Generation builds
• Raw calculation %'s were in the range of 172% when compared to a 3600X* (up from 140% for 11th-gen and 109% for 10th-gen)
• 81 degrees 40-50% CPU utilisation with one p-cores pinned to max.

*Raw calculations are based on calculating large quantities of prime factors in the Unity engine.

*Keep in mind we are still revising these builds, working on improving their cooling and airflow as well as looking at using 12-900K chips.

If you're interested in getting your hands on one of these then you can place a preorder on https://tempest.net or speak to our team about a machine that fits your needs!