News Intel Core i9-13900K and Core i5-13600K Review: Raptor Lake Beats Ryzen 7000

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Great work on the review. I wonder if Raptor Lake will end up making Alder Lake not worth buying. I had planned on grabbing a 12900KS assuming that its price would fall after 13 comes, but the 13700KF might end up being a better choice if this generation is so much better than the last. I don't really have a productivity use case. I have a Z690 board ready for a chip. I guess we'll see what happens.
 

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Great work on the review. I wonder if Raptor Lake will end up making Alder Lake not worth buying. I had planned on grabbing a 12900KS assuming that its price would fall after 13 comes, but the 13700KF might end up being a better choice if this generation is so much better than the last. I don't really have a productivity use case. I have a Z690 board ready for a chip. I guess we'll see what happens.

Saw that one coming. Basically a faster 12900K. 12900 might go on a reasonable sale like the 10850K and 10900 did.

10900F launched at $470, low of $348.99
12900F has only gotten down to $489.99, but with the 13700 and 13700F likely to land at ~$400, something will have to give.
 
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We put all three of Intel's new 13th-Generation Raptor Lake chips, the Core i9-13900K, i7-13700K, and i5-13600K, up against AMD's competing Ryzen 7000 processors.

Intel Core i9-13900K and Core i5-13600K Review: Raptor Lake Beats Ryzen 7000 : Read more
I can't help but wonder how much Intel is paying you to write this. The benchmarks clearly show that AMD is faster at multi-threaded applications and Intel is better at gaming, but your articles ALWAYS publish with titles saying that Intel is faster.

But more importantly, you still refuse to run realistic benchmarks. Post a run for each Intel chip with a $100 cooler on quiet mode--what users will actually have. Then let the system thermal throttle and post performance AFTER throttling.

Maybe Intel wins there, but I've NEVER seen it. The ONE article I found that actually tried it, had Intel lose 30% performance due to throttling and lose handily to AMD.
 
It's a shame that so much focus in all the reviews online is going to the i9. Yes it's very power hungry, I think everywhere knew it would be, i9 have never been about power efficiency.

Meanwhile the far more interesting story is that mainstream i5 13600k, which is beating even the i9 12900k in games and beating everything AMD has, even at stock.

That i5 is a $319 chip beating last gen's $589 i9 in games, and doing it using around 30% less power.

That i5 gives gamers the same i9 performance of last gen at half the price, and using far less power to do it. That's insane.
That's a good point. But if you're buying AMD for gaming, it really has to be the 5800X3D or wait until January.

At the i5's price point, the AM4 platform delivers better gaming performance.
 
Overall, if you intend to use the 13900K as an HEDT-type CPU (all-core all-blast) most of the time, you will need to invest heavily in cooling. Even in closed cases with 360 AIOs, it seems that it will throttle and reach 100°c all the time, very fast. This happens much faster than with the 12900K (in terms of reaching max temps), which are some important asterisks for people to plan ahead for. I would also say, that putting the 13900K in a SFF build will get super tricky unless you cap the power/temps of it. Against the 7950X, as I expectd, basically close match, but because of those asterisks, I'm willing to give the edge to the 7950X if you're building new. As an HEDT-type platform, AM5 just thas better all-around connectivity and future plans, so you will be able to get an even better CPU later on if you want, but if you're willing to throw away the whole thing for the "next best thing", then toss a coin, as you may have money to burn and go with what makes you happy. Gaming wise, Intel takes the edge, again, with some asterisks, but for games you shouldn't be looking at the 13900K or 7950X anyway; not exclusively at least.

The big winner here is the 13600K IMO, as it demonstrates it can be a great "value" CPU for people looking to build a new PC, even with the small price hike. It's an overall decent CPU, with manageable temps and you can still tweak it a bit to extact more performance out of it. Too bad it seems Intel won't be doing Raptor Lake in the lower SKUs from there, so the lower end will have to wait a bit more for something new (if at all). That being said, the differences are noticeable with a 4090 anyway, so I'm sure anyone building with something from either AMD or Intel will have a very decent gaming rig for years to come. You can't go wrong with either and should just build whatever comes cheaper/easier for your needs. That's like the most important thing here to take away as a conclusion, I'd say.

So, the next move needs to come from AMD.

What will it be, AMD? Price reductions? Bundles? VCache rather soon? All of the previous? XD

Regards.
And that's why I've been complaining about Tom's "Journalism" the last couple years. They keep publishing articles touting Intel's performance, even if AMD wins the tests, and never will actually run a test where Intel chips are allowed to do the real-life thermal throttling.
 
I didn't know anyone bought a 13900K and started up some Cyberpunk at 1080p... Who cares about 1080p gaming anymore? These benchmarks are stupid
Cool. You buy a bunch of expensive hardware. I'm running 3x 1080p screens for productivity and do some gaming. For that, it's 1080p on an RX480 from pre-mining. I updated my CPU two years ago, but not my graphics yet.
 

shady28

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Great work on the review. I wonder if Raptor Lake will end up making Alder Lake not worth buying. I had planned on grabbing a 12900KS assuming that its price would fall after 13 comes, but the 13700KF might end up being a better choice if this generation is so much better than the last. I don't really have a productivity use case. I have a Z690 board ready for a chip. I guess we'll see what happens.

Yeah, I might've made the mistake of buying a 12700KF last week for $300 on sale during Amazon Prime day.

This week the freaking $330 13600K wipes the floor with every Zen 4 / Alder Lake in games, and can keep up with 12900K / 7900X in productivity apps.

sigh
 
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philged

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It's interesting how different the gaming outcomes our in this review vs. the one on Anandtech. This is showing a pretty hefty intel win across the board where Anandtech's review is showing an almost punch for punch tie depending on which titles you favor.

Only big difference it looks like is the other review is using a 6950XT vs the 4090 test bed here.

Looking at 1080p average fps winners for Toms vs Anand:

Cyberpunk: Tom's 13900K - Anand 5800X3D
Red Dead 2: Tom's 5800X3D - Anand 13900K
F1 2022: Tom's 5800X3D - Anand 13900K
Hitman 3: Tom's 13900K - Anand 13900K (but Anand has the 13600k & X3D tied)
Warhammer 3: Tom's 13900K - Anand 7600X

Same goes for most of the 1440 titles as well. It would be really interesting to see how this all lines up with different, more mainstream tier video cards.

It's also especially interesting that Tom's is showing some wins with the AMD processor using an nVidia card, and Anandtech is showing the same games with Intel winning when using an AMD card.
 

waltc3

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What's amusing for me is looking back on how the pundits complained about the 7950X's 170W TDP & 230W MSP power budgets, but I don't hear much of anything about the 330W+ the 13900k will gladly consume! That's exceptionally strange, imo. Well, at least, it should keep them from continuing to complain about the top-end 7950X's power consumption--if we're lucky...
 

shady28

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It's interesting how different the gaming outcomes our in this review vs. the one on Anandtech. This is showing a pretty hefty intel win across the board where Anandtech's review is showing an almost punch for punch tie depending on which titles you favor.

Only big difference it looks like is the other review is using a 6950XT vs the 4090 test bed here.

Looking at 1080p average fps winners for Toms vs Anand:

Cyberpunk: Tom's 13900K - Anand 5800X3D
Red Dead 2: Tom's 5800X3D - Anand 13900K
F1 2022: Tom's 5800X3D - Anand 13900K
Hitman 3: Tom's 13900K - Anand 13900K (but Anand has the 13600k & X3D tied)
Warhammer 3: Tom's 13900K - Anand 7600X

Same goes for most of the 1440 titles as well. It would be really interesting to see how this all lines up with different, more mainstream tier video cards.

It's also especially interesting that Tom's is showing some wins with the AMD processor using an nVidia card, and Anandtech is showing the same games with Intel winning when using an AMD card.

Anand is using a 6950XT, which favors AMD rigs with SAM.

They are also using DDR5-5600 JEDEC timings.

The slower RAM will favor larger cache like Zen 4 has.
 

shady28

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What's amusing for me is looking back on how the pundits complained about the 7950X's 170W TDP & 230W MSP power budgets, but I don't hear much of anything about the 330W+ the 13900k will gladly consume! That's exceptionally strange, imo. Well, at least, it should keep them from continuing to complain about the top-end 7950X's power consumption--if we're lucky...

Watch Der8auer's video.

You don't have to run the 13900K flat out to beat everything else.

This 13900K power limited to 90W...

WFUWE8d.jpg
 
Anand is using a 6950XT, which favors AMD rigs with SAM.

They are also using DDR5-5600 JEDEC timings.

The slower RAM will favor larger cache like Zen 4 has.
Careful there. SAM is just ReBAR with another name. Intel platforms also have it and have the exact scaling and problems as AMD has. So, saying "AMD + AMD" is somehow biased is completely false. Do not fall into conspiracy theories, please.

And AnandTech always uses JEDEC speeds, which is not a bad thing TBH. It gives a good perspective of how these CPUs will perform with their "official" RAM support.

In other comments/topics, this made me laugh, but in a good way: "hypocrites" x'D
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5VQm7IMYIs


Regards.
 

luissantos

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Anand is using a 6950XT, which favors AMD rigs with SAM.

They are also using DDR5-5600 JEDEC timings.

The slower RAM will favor larger cache like Zen 4 has.

Intel also supports resizable BAR. The difference is negligible.

Funny thing about the DDR5 frequency. Why did Tom's use 5600 for Intel and 5200 for AMD?
 
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shady28

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Intel also supports resizable BAR. The difference is negligible.

Funny thing about the DDR5 frequency. Why did Tom's use 5600 for Intel and 5200 for AMD?

Tom's has always used the max certified JEDEC speeds.

This has played against Intel when for example they used DDR5-4800 for Alder Lake, and DDR5-5200 for AMD. It also played against Intel when they used DDR4-2933 vs DDR4-3200 for AMD.

If they had deviated from that pattern, that would be bias. What they did is consistent.
 
Tom's has always used the max certified JEDEC speeds.

This has played against Intel when for example they used DDR5-4800 for Alder Lake, and DDR5-5200 for AMD. It also played against Intel when they used DDR4-2933 vs DDR4-3200 for AMD.

If they had deviated from that pattern, that would be bias. What they did is consistent.
What are you talking about? Tom's Hardware always uses XMP where applicable.

It's AnandTech that always uses JEDEC.

Regards.
 

shady28

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What are you talking about? Tom's Hardware always uses XMP where applicable.

It's AnandTech that always uses JEDEC.

Regards.

They used rated speed up to the 10900K review. It does seem they were all over the board with Zen 3 / Rocket Lake.

Then they did this with AL :
ntel Socket 1700 DDR5 (Z690)Core i9-12900K, Core i5-12600K
MSI Z690 Carbon WiFi
2 x16GB G.Skill Ripjaws S5, DDR5-5200 @ DDR5-4400 36-36-36-72
 
I can't help but wonder how much Intel is paying you to write this. The benchmarks clearly show that AMD is faster at multi-threaded applications and Intel is better at gaming, but your articles ALWAYS publish with titles saying that Intel is faster.

But more importantly, you still refuse to run realistic benchmarks. Post a run for each Intel chip with a $100 cooler on quiet mode--what users will actually have. Then let the system thermal throttle and post performance AFTER throttling.

Maybe Intel wins there, but I've NEVER seen it. The ONE article I found that actually tried it, had Intel lose 30% performance due to throttling and lose handily to AMD.
Seriously how many people are going to purchase a $400+ unlocked Intel i9 / i7 cpu and run it with a $100 air cooler?
 

purple_dragon

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Why is every article showing prices below msrp on the 13900k? It is $659 in the US not 589.
Actually, Micro Center is selling the I9 13900k for $569.99 the I7 13700k for $399.99 and the I5 13600k $299.99 but they are only available in store. Perhaps some stores will price match but I doubt it. Unfortunately, not everyone has a Micro Center near them.
 
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They used rated speed up to the 10900K review. It does seem they were all over the board with Zen 3 / Rocket Lake.

Then they did this with AL :
ntel Socket 1700 DDR5 (Z690)Core i9-12900K, Core i5-12600K
MSI Z690 Carbon WiFi
2 x16GB G.Skill Ripjaws S5, DDR5-5200 @ DDR5-4400 36-36-36-72
You may be right then, but they do use XMP when checking OC at least.

I'm willing to be wrong, but I've always cross checked numbers and they do appear to be run with XMP enabled.

Seriously how many people are going to purchase a $400+ unlocked Intel i9 / i7 cpu and run it with a $100 air cooler?
No one, because they can't :LOL:

But in all seriousness, when you have a 360 AIO (inside of a case) that still can't cool your CPU, that's just a bit way too much. I do want to know what is Intel's stance on running the i9 (and maybe i7?) at 100°c for long periods. If someone is not putting that load on an i9, I think it's a moot point for both AMD and Intel.

Regards.
 
Actually, Micro Center is selling the I9 13900k for $569.99 the I7 13700k for $399.99 and the I5 13600k $299.99 but they are only available in store. Perhaps some stores will price match but I doubt it. Unfortunately, not everyone has a Micro Center near them.
According to Tom from MLiD (I linked his video earlier) it's because MicroCenter got a better 1K tray price from Intel and it's selling them near cost (for some reason?).

As always, abundant salt or soy sauce on that info.

Regards.
 
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