SYSTEM ANALYZER

Rate My PC: Intel Core i9-12900 + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 OEM

Get a comprehensive performance analysis of your gaming rig with detailed benchmarks, bottleneck detection, and upgrade recommendations

Build Configuration

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PROCESSOR (CPU)

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GRAPHICS CARD (GPU)

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91 Score

Top 9% Ranking

91 / 100

ULTIMATE READY

Apex Performer

Top 9% of systems. Capable of 4K Ultra gaming and advanced rendering.

4K 60+ FPSVR ReadyRay Tracing

System Balance Analysis

CPU vs GPU performance ratio

Well Balanced

CPU

93%

GPU

89%

PROCESSOR

Intel Core i9-12900

42,906 Benchmark Score

Top 7% Market Ranking

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GRAPHICS CARD

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 OEM

15,199 Benchmark Score

Top 11% Market Ranking

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Market Position

How your build compares to others

Budget

0-30

Mid-Range

30-60

High-End

60-85

Enthusiast

85-100

Your Build

Game Performance Benchmarks

Real-world 4K FPS in popular titles

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Performance Insights

Tips to maximize your system

Optimal Performance

Your system is in the top tier. You can run any modern game at maximum settings.

4K Gaming Ready

Consider a 4K 144Hz monitor to fully utilize your hardware capabilities.

Compatible Games See what you can play Compare CPUs Find upgrades Compare GPUs Find upgrades

Performance Tiers Explained

90-100

Ultimate

4K Ultra gaming, VR ready, ray tracing enabled, professional workloads

4K 60+ FPS VR Ready

70-89

High-End

1440p Ultra or 4K High settings, excellent for modern AAA titles

1440p Ultra 4K High

50-69

Mid-Range

1080p Ultra or 1440p Medium, great value for most gamers

1080p Ultra 1440p Med

30-49

Entry Level

1080p Medium settings, suitable for eSports and older titles

1080p Med eSports

0-29

Legacy

Basic gaming, older titles, consider upgrading for modern games

720p-1080p Low Older Games

The Intel Core i9-12900 paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 OEM is one of the more lopsided combinations in the benchmark database: a 16-core Alder Lake flagship sitting alongside an entry-tier Ampere card. The CPU lands in the 88th percentile against all processors, while the GPU sits in just the 57th percentile against all graphics cards, producing a combined percentile of 73. That asymmetry defines everything about this build — it will churn through CPU-bound workloads without breaking a sweat, then wait on the graphics card whenever pixels need pushing. Notably, the FACT PACK for this exact pairing contains no measured FPS data, so all frame-rate discussion below is estimated from the benchmark scores rather than recorded in-game measurements.

GPU Analysis

The RTX 3050 OEM is built on the GA106 die, fabricated by Samsung on an 8 nm process. That die measures 276 mm² and packs 12,000 million transistors, giving a transistor density of 43.5M per mm². The silicon is small by Ampere standards, and the specs tell the story of an entry-level card: 2304 shading units, 72 texture mapping units, and 32 render output units. Ray tracing is present via 18 RT cores, and AI acceleration via 72 tensor cores, so the card is technically DirectX 12 Ultimate (feature level 12_2) compliant with Vulkan 1.4 and OpenGL 4.6 support.

Memory is where the card's class shows most clearly. It carries 8 GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus, running at 14 Gbps effective for 224.0 GB/s of bandwidth. That is a narrow, modestly fast memory subsystem, and it caps how much the 2304 shaders can be fed at higher resolutions and detail settings. Clocks are reasonable: 1515 MHz base and 1755 MHz boost. The resulting theoretical throughput is 8.087 TFLOPS FP32, with FP16 running at the same 1:1 rate, a pixel fill rate of 56.16 GPixel/s, and a texture rate of 126.4 GTexel/s.

Benchmark scores place the card precisely. The PassMark G3D score of 11857 contributes to an average benchmark score of 15199, which puts the RTX 3050 OEM in the 57th percentile of all GPUs. The nearest rivals list is telling: the AMD Radeon RX 7600 averages 15171, just 0.2 percent behind; the Radeon 680M — an integrated graphics solution — averages 15270, 0.5 percent ahead; and the GeForce RTX 2060 averages 15290, 0.6 percent ahead. When an iGPU like the 680M trades blows with a discrete card, that contextualises the 3050 OEM's rendering ceiling: it competes in the mainstream tier, not the enthusiast tier. Compute benchmarks reinforce this — Geekbench OpenCL scores 60740 and Vulkan scores 57103, while PassMark GPU compute sits at 5779. Those are usable numbers for GPU-accelerated encoding, filter work, and light compute, but nowhere near workstation-class throughput.

For rendering specifically, the implication is straightforward. Eight gigabytes of VRAM and 224 GB/s of bandwidth mean 1080p is the natural habitat, with 1440p viable in lighter titles or with settings reduced. Ray tracing is supported but the 18 RT cores will struggle with heavy path-traced workloads; rasterisation remains this card's comfort zone.

Balance and Bottleneck

This is a textbook GPU-limited build. The i9-12900 sits at the 88th percentile of all CPUs; the RTX 3050 OEM sits at the 57th percentile of all GPUs. In any graphically demanding game, the graphics card will be saturated long before the processor runs out of headroom. Sixteen cores and twenty-four threads cannot help a GPU that is already at full utilisation — the CPU will simply idle through most render frames.

The percentile gap also explains why the combined percentile of 73 lands well below the CPU's individual standing. The database scores the pairing as a whole, and the GPU drags the average down while the CPU lifts it. For gaming, the meaningful question is never "can the CPU keep up" — it demonstrably can — but "what can the GPU deliver."

In the other direction, the picture inverts. CPU-bound workloads like compilation, compression, encryption, and physics simulation will exploit the i9 fully. The PassMark physics score of 1730 and multithread score of 33608 reflect a processor with substantial parallel throughput, and none of that capacity is constrained by the RTX 3050. The only caveat is GPU compute: for workloads that lean on OpenCL or CUDA, the 3050 OEM's compute score of 5779 and OpenCL score of 60740 become the limiting factor, not the CPU.

Because there are no measured FPS rows for this pairing, scaling evidence comes from the benchmark scores themselves: the G3D score of 11857, sitting near the RX 7600 and RTX 2060 in the rival list, indicates frame rates typical of that performance tier, where CPU overhead is rarely the constraint at any resolution.

CPU Analysis

The Core i9-12900 is an Alder Lake-S processor on Intel's 10 nm process, with a 215 mm² die. It uses a hybrid design totalling 16 cores and 24 threads, with a base clock of 2.40 GHz and a boost clock of 5.10 GHz. The cache hierarchy is generous: 80 KB of L1 per core, 1.25 MB of L2 per core, and a shared 30 MB of L3. It supports both DDR4 and DDR5 on a dual-channel bus, delivering up to 76.8 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and it is one of the few consumer chips in its bracket with ECC memory support — a marker of workstation credibility.

The benchmark results show a flagship-tier processor. Cinebench R23 multi-core scores 18628 with 1825 single-core; R20 delivers 11994 multi and 1693 single; R15 posts 3299 multi and 262 single. Geekbench lands at 13088 multi-core and 1993 single-core. The PassMark suite fills out the picture: 33608 multithread, 4003 single thread, 127512 integer math, 91514 floating point math, 407899 data compression, 23203 encryption, 24777 extended instructions, 44070 string sorting, and a find-prime-numbers result of 121. The average benchmark score across all tests is 42906, placing the chip in the 88th percentile of all CPUs.

The nearest rivals list shows how tight the competition is. The i9-12900KF averages 42830 — a gap of just 0.2 percent. The Core Ultra 9 386H averages 43210, 0.7 percent ahead. The i9-12950HX, a mobile part, averages 42487, 1 percent behind. And the AMD Ryzen AI Max PRO 385 averages 43326, 1 percent ahead. In other words, this is a processor that still trades blows with much newer silicon, including mobile flagships and modern AI-branded chips.

For real workloads, the single-core scores near 2000 in Geekbench and 1825 in Cinebench R23 mean snappy, low-latency responsiveness in applications that refuse to parallelise — older games, CAD interactions, spreadsheet recalculations. The multi-core numbers mean serious batch throughput: code compilation, video encoding, and simulation all scale well across 24 threads. The 65 W TDP rating is notably conservative for a 16-core flagship, reflecting the non-K positioning of this part, though its multiplier is unlocked, which leaves headroom for tuning.

Usage Scenarios

High-refresh gaming. The GPU is the constraint. With a G3D score of 11857 and rivals clustering around the RX 7600 and RTX 2060, expect competitive frame rates at 1080p in esports and mainstream titles, with AAA games requiring setting adjustments. The CPU's 4003 single-thread PassMark score guarantees no processor-side stutter.

Streaming. This is a scenario the build handles asymmetrically. The i9's 18628 Cinebench R23 multi-core score leaves ample threads for encoding while gaming, and 72 tensor cores on the GPU support NVENC-style hardware acceleration. The bottleneck is game rendering itself — the GPU will be at capacity before the CPU is.

Video editing. Strong fit on the CPU side: 33608 PassMark multithread and 407899 data compression indicate fast timeline scrubbing, proxy generation, and export. The 8 GB of VRAM is the limitation for GPU-heavy effects and high-resolution timelines. DDR5 support and 76.8 GB/s of memory bandwidth help.

3D rendering. CPU rendering is excellent — Cinebench R23 multi at 18628 places it in the upper tier. GPU rendering is entry-level: the OpenCL score of 60740 and compute score of 5779 will render, but slowly, and 8 GB of VRAM limits scene complexity.

Software development. Arguably this build's best scenario. The Geekbench multi-core score of 13088 and integer math score of 127512 translate directly to fast compilation. Virtualisation, containers, and parallel test suites all benefit from 24 threads. ECC support adds reliability for long-running builds.

Student and office work. Overkill in the best way for the CPU, adequate for everything else. Documents, browsing, and video calls barely register on this processor; the integrated UHD Graphics 770 provides a fallback display path if the discrete card is ever removed.

Upgrade Path and Platform

The platform is modern and forward-looking. The i9-12900 uses Intel Socket 1700, supports both DDR4 and DDR5 memory depending on the motherboard, and offers PCIe Gen 5 with 16 lanes from the CPU. The GPU connects over PCIe 4.0 x8 — worth noting, because the card does not use the full 16 lanes, though at this performance tier the narrower link is not the limiting factor.

Power requirements are modest. The CPU carries a 65 W TDP and the GPU a 130 W TDP, with NVIDIA suggesting a 300 W PSU for the graphics card alone. In practice, this pairing is comfortable in a modest system PSU, and there is significant headroom for a future GPU upgrade — a much faster card could be dropped in without replacing the power delivery, assuming the installed unit exceeds the suggested figure with margin.

The obvious upgrade direction is the graphics card. The RTX 3050 OEM is end-of-life, sits 31 percentile points below the CPU, and caps gaming performance for the entire system. Because the processor sits in the 88th percentile with rivals within 1 percent of far newer chips, the CPU can credibly feed a substantially faster GPU for years. Memory is another lever: the dual-channel bus with DDR5 support and 76.8 GB/s of bandwidth is already strong, but populating faster DDR5 modules benefits bandwidth-hungry workloads. The unlocked multiplier on the CPU allows tuning where the motherboard and cooling permit — qualitatively, a capable air cooler is sufficient for the 65 W part at stock settings.

Gaming Performance

No measured FPS data exists for this exact CPU-plus-GPU combination — the database contains no measuredFps rows for the pairing, and dataIsMeasured is false. Everything in this section is therefore an estimate derived from the benchmark scores, not recorded in-game figures.

Working from the PassMark G3D score of 11857, the average GPU benchmark score of 15199, and the 57th percentile standing, the RTX 3050 OEM should deliver smooth 1080p gaming in most titles at high settings, with esports and lighter games pushing comfortably into high-refresh territory where the display supports it — the CPU will never be the limiter there. At 1440p, expect to reduce detail settings in demanding AAA releases; the 224 GB/s of memory bandwidth and 8 GB framebuffer are the constraining factors, and modern titles with large texture sets may press against the VRAM ceiling at ultra settings. At 4K, this card is not a realistic option for demanding games. Ray tracing, while supported through the 18 RT cores and DirectX 12 Ultimate compliance, will exact a heavy cost; DLSS-style upscaling via the 72 tensor cores is the practical way to enable it. These are estimates framed by the benchmark scores and rival positioning — treat them as directional, not measured.

Who Should Build It

The ideal owner of this build is someone whose workload is CPU-dominant but who still wants competent mainstream gaming. Software developers are the clearest fit: 24 threads, a 13088 Geekbench multi-core score, ECC support, and PCIe Gen 5 make a strong development workstation, with the GPU handling occasional gaming and light compute. Content creators who edit video primarily on the CPU — encoding, compression, timeline work — get flagship throughput, though GPU-heavy editors should note the 5779 compute score and 8 GB of VRAM.

Gamers should calibrate expectations: this is a 1080p-first pairing, with the GPU positioned against the RX 7600 and RTX 2060, not against upper-tier cards. Students and small-business workstation users benefit from the reliability angle — ECC support and a 65 W TDP make for a cool, stable, long-running system — though such users likely don't need 16 cores. 3D artists who render on the CPU will be well served; those who render on the GPU will not. Anyone in the "buy the CPU now, upgrade the GPU soon" camp is exactly who this configuration suits, because the processor's 88th-percentile standing leaves a long runway for a future graphics upgrade.

FAQ

Q: How does the i9-12900 compare to its rivals in benchmark scores?

A: Its average score of 42906 sits within 1 percent of the i9-12900KF (42830, 0.2 percent gap), Core Ultra 9 386H (43210, 0.7 percent ahead), i9-12950HX (42487, 1 percent behind), and Ryzen AI Max PRO 385 (43326, 1 percent ahead).

Q: Is the RTX 3050 OEM good for 1080p gaming?

A: Yes — its PassMark G3D score of 11857 and 57th-percentile standing, benchmarked near the RX 7600 and RTX 2060, indicate solid 1080p performance, though without measured FPS data these are estimates from benchmark scores.

Q: Does this build have measured frame rates in the database?

A: No. No measuredFps data exists for this pairing and dataIsMeasured is false; all frame-rate discussion is inferred from the benchmark scores.

Q: What memory does the platform support?

A: The i9-12900 supports both DDR4 and DDR5 on a dual-channel bus with 76.8 GB/s of bandwidth, and it supports ECC memory.

Q: What PSU does the GPU require?

A: NVIDIA suggests a 300 W PSU for the RTX 3050 OEM, which draws 130 W itself via a single 8-pin connector; the CPU adds a 65 W TDP.

Q: Is the CPU overclockable?

A: Yes, the i9-12900 has an unlocked multiplier, allowing tuning on compatible motherboards.

Q: Does the GPU support ray tracing and modern APIs?

A: Yes — 18 RT cores, 72 tensor cores, DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), Vulkan 1.4, and OpenGL 4.6, though the card's performance tier limits how heavily ray tracing can be used.

Benchmark Performance

The exact scores are as follows. CPU: Cinebench R23 multi 18628, single 1825; Cinebench R20 multi 11994, single 1693; Cinebench R15 multi 3299, single 262; Geekbench multi 13088, single 1993; PassMark multithread 33608, single thread 4003, integer math 127512, floating point 91514, data compression 407899, encryption 23203, extended instructions 24777, string sorting 44070, physics 1730, find prime numbers 121. Average CPU benchmark score: 42906, at the 88th percentile versus all CPUs.

GPU: Geekbench OpenCL 60740, Vulkan 57103; PassMark G3D 11857, GPU compute 5779, DirectX 9 at 137, DirectX 10 at 61, DirectX 11 at 86, DirectX 12 at 58, G2D at 973. Average GPU benchmark score: 15199, at the 57th percentile versus all GPUs.

The combined picture is a 73rd-percentile desktop build whose performance profile is entirely CPU-shaped. Every rendering test is gated by the graphics card; every compute, compilation, and creation test is gated by a processor that still matches silicon released well after it. The data invites one conclusion: this is a strong platform wearing an modest graphics card.

Build Overview

This is a desktop-class pairing: Intel's Core i9-12900, a 16-core, 24-thread Alder Lake flagship on Socket 1700, matched with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3050 OEM, an 8 GB Ampere card on the GA106 die. Both parts launched on the same date, 2022-01-03, and the CPU's launch MSRP was $519.

The tier assignment is unambiguous. The CPU's 88th percentile and the GPU's 57th percentile bracket a combined 73rd percentile — an upper-mainstream build overall, but one whose character splits cleanly down the middle: workstation-grade processing power underneath, entry-tier graphics on top. The GPU is end-of-life; the CPU remains in active production. For a database classification, this is a high-end CPU workstation pairing with a mainstream gaming ceiling — a combination that makes sense today chiefly as a platform awaiting a better graphics card.

Rate My PC: Intel Core i9-12900 + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 OEM

Apex Performer

System Balance Analysis

Intel Core i9-12900

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 OEM

Market Position

Game Performance Benchmarks

Cyberpunk 2077

Red Dead Redemption 2

Microsoft Flight Simulator

Control

Call of Duty: Warzone

Fortnite

Performance Insights

Optimal Performance

4K Gaming Ready

Performance Tiers Explained

Ultimate

High-End

Mid-Range

Entry Level

Legacy

GPU Analysis

Balance and Bottleneck

CPU Analysis

Usage Scenarios

Upgrade Path and Platform

Gaming Performance

Who Should Build It

FAQ

Benchmark Performance

Build Overview

4K Gaming Performance

Cyberpunk 2077

Red Dead Redemption 2

Microsoft Flight Simulator

Control

Call of Duty: Warzone

Fortnite

1440p Gaming Performance

Cyberpunk 2077

Red Dead Redemption 2

Microsoft Flight Simulator

Control

Call of Duty: Warzone

Fortnite

1080p Gaming Performance

Cyberpunk 2077

Red Dead Redemption 2

Microsoft Flight Simulator

Control

Call of Duty: Warzone

Fortnite

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