It's only been four months since Alder Lake's release, and Intel's Core i7-12700K (one of the best CPUs on the market) has already become Newegg's best-seller, trading places with the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X. This CPU ranks number one or two in Newegg's top sellers list consistently and is the only Intel CPU in Newegg's top five list.
We are not surprised to see Intel's 12700K dominating the market right now. In our review of the 12700K, we noted how well the CPU performed, comfortably beating out its predecessor, the 11700K, and more importantly, beating out its competitors like the Ryzen 7 5800X. The processor even comes close to the performance of AMD's vastly more expensive Ryzen 9 5900X. The 12700K accomplishes this feat while being just $10 to $30 more expensive than the 5800X depending on the retailer.
Intel's Alder Lake family delivers a combination of a new core microarchitecture (Golden Cove) and a hybrid core architecture featuring high-performance cores and low-powered efficiency cores. As a result, Intel achieved a level of single-core and multi-core efficiency that its older 14nm CPUs could never match.
The high adoption rate of the 12700K is also helped by Intel's newly released B series and H series chipsets, which are priced far more competitively than Intel's flagship Z690 chipset. This lower barrier to entry is far more appealing to mainstream buyers.
Before the arrival of these cheaper chipsets, Z690 boards were the only motherboard options for Alder Lake. And if you wanted to get a good board with a decent set of features, you'd have to pay more than competing options from AMD. Unfortunately, this price difference was great enough to the point where AMD's vastly cheaper price point could outweigh Alder Lake's excellent CPU performance.
Now with cheaper boards from Intel available, such as the B660 platform, you can get an Alder Lake-supported motherboard at a price point comparable to AMD's B550 and even B450 boards.
Despite Intel's 12700K being a top seller, the rest of Newegg's top best sellers are still predominantly occupied by AMD, including the 5600X, 5800X, 5600G, and 5900X. However, when looking more at the bottom of the list (the top 10 to be precise), Intel does come swinging back with the i9-12900K, 12600K, 11700K, and 11600K.
With cheaper 600 series boards now in the picture, we suspect the 12900K and especially the 12600K to start creeping up the top seller list soon with their superior CPU performance over AMD's Zen 3 options.
