Scan 3XS GWP-ME A124C

A brilliant content-creation showcase for Intel’s 12th gen Core i9 and Nvidia’s Quadro RTX A4500 graphics

- JAMES MORRIS

PRICE £3,333 (£4,000 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk

In recent years, Intel surrendered its long-held dominance in the AMD. But now the regular Threadripper has been discontinued in favour of the feature-rich but more expensive Threadripper Pro, Intel is clawing its way back. The 12th generation of Intel Core processors, codenamed Alder Lake, has undeniably strong qualities - particularly for workstations and high-end desktops. And Scan's 3XS GWP-ME A124C shows just how much Alder Lake has to offer content-creation professionals.

The central element of the A124C is its Core i9-12900K processor, which is one rung below the top 12900KS model. The novelty with Alder Lake is that it has two types of cores:P high-performance cores and E power-efficient cores. Only P cores support Hyper-Threading, so while the 12900K has 16 cores, it presents 24 threads. Clock frequencies are also different, with the 12900K's P cores set at a nominal 3.2GHz with 5.1GHz boost, while the E cores start at 2.4GHz with a 3.9GHz max. The P cores also offer a 5.2GHz turbo capability.

This array of frequencies and features makes perfect sense for content creation. Software packages in this space either favour fewer cores with high frequencies, or they like lots of cores. Broadly speaking, 3D modelling, video editing and photo editing would be the former, and 3D rendering the latter. The i9-12900K offers the best of both these worlds.

Massive memory