Question I5 13600k or i7 12700k (P cores for gaming)

[shad0wboss]

Hey guys, I was doing some reading on the power cores and efficiency cores and discovered that for gaming, only power cores matter so with all the current benchmarks, we see i5 13600k (6 P cores) performing great but what about the games in 1-3 years that may need more cores? Would you say that a 12700k might over perform a 13600k due to having higher p cores? I am talking about gaming strictly.

 

[Lafong]

As far as I know, single thread performance is still highly indicative of gaming performance.

The 13600K has about a 3% advantage over the 12700K in that respect.

"what about the games in 1-3 years that may need more cores?".....

Key word is "may". Is that more than speculation and grounds for influencing a buying decision?

 

[shad0wboss]

As far as I know, single thread performance is still highly indicative of gaming performance.

The 13600K has about a 3% advantage over the 12700K in that respect.

"what about the games in 1-3 years that may need more cores?".....

Key word is "may". Is that more than speculation and grounds for influencing a buying decision?

The reason why I asked this is because I am coming from i5 8400 (6 cores) and decided to buy a 13600k (6 p cores). Although 13600k has higher number of threads, it is still essentially a 6-core and I think the 6 core era will last in a few years as we are already seeing some very CPU intensive games so although i5 seems to be performing very well, I am now considering a 13700k (for $70 more in the local market) and will couple it with a z690 to save money there.

Not sure if I am being wise here but upgrading CPU is harder in the future than just swapping GPUs and I would rather have a power cpu now and keep the PC for a couple of years. This is what I learned when I bought i5 8400 back then, which was mind you, the best gaming CPU of its time when the 8th gen came out.

 

[geofelt]

While the 13600K has 6 P cores, those cores are hyperthreaded, giving you 12 fast processing threads.
Few games are going to effectively use more than a handful of processing threads.
Multiplayer with many participants may be an exception.
It is the single thread performance of the game master threads that most determines gaming cpu performance.
Run the cpu-Z bench on your I5-8400. You should get a rating of about 451:

CPU-Z Benchmark for Intel Core i5-8400 (1T) - CPU-Z VALIDATOR

Best CPU performance - 64-bit - June 2023

valid.x86.fr

13600K is 827 and 13700K is 864.
You mostly get what you pay for at any price point.

 

[jnjnilson6]

Hey guys, I was doing some reading on the power cores and efficiency cores and discovered that for gaming, only power cores matter so with all the current benchmarks, we see i5 13600k (6 P cores) performing great but what about the games in 1-3 years that may need more cores? Would you say that a 12700k might over perform a 13600k due to having higher p cores? I am talking about gaming strictly.

The Core i5-13600K tops it; barely, but it does. It would most definitely be a good, futureproof option.