With just one calendar month in between their respective showcase , bothDr . Lisa Su of AMDandIntel ’s Pat Gelsingerdeclared their forthcoming line of CPU to be the respectable and fastest gaming central processing unit on the market . These are bold claims from both manufacturers , however , AMD’sZen 4 - powered juggernautleft an impression that require a strong answer . Now it ’s time to see Intel ’s reaction — and what a reply they gave !
Codenamed Raptor Lake , Intel ’s 13th Generation Core processor family conform to closely in the footsteps of the Alder Lake release – and I intend tight . It was only 11 months ago that Intel ’s 12th Generation Core processors were publish .
tight ahead to the nowadays and we have the next looping of Intel ’s intercrossed core architecture in hand . With six CPUs across the Core i5 , Core i7 , and Core i9 families bring out and a limit version 6.0 gigahertz central processing unit tantalise at September ’s Intel Innovations summit , it would be an understatement to say that we have been anticipate this here and now since the promulgation .
Photo: Damien Gula / Gizmodo
For this article , we received two 13th Generation Core CPUs from Intel – the Core i5 - 13600 K and Core i9 - 13900K. We ’re going to break down what has changed from 12th Gen to 13th Gen , look at a bunch of information , speak about the modern CPU landscape painting , and , of course , talk a bit about who these products are good suited for .
Intel Core i5 - 13600 K and Core i9 - 13900 K C.P.U.
Intel ’s 13th Generation Core Processors improve on Alder Lake ’s architecture with more core , more cache , and stunning functioning .
Photo: Damien Gula / Gizmodo
What Is It ?
Intel Core i5 - 13600 K and Core i9 - 13900K. Members of Intel ’s 13th Generation Core crime syndicate of CPUs .
Leontyne Price
Photo: Damien Gula / Gizmodo
$ 319 ( pith i5 - 13600 K ) and $ 589 ( Core i9 - 13900 K )
Like
nub i9 - 13900 K goes toe - to - toe with the Ryzen 9 7950X at a fraction of the price . heart and soul i5 - 13600 K border out Ryzen 5 performance . More options for budget - friendly build .
Graphic: Damien Gula / Gizmodo
Dislike
Power efficiency is less than stellar . high functioning cool off is a must .
Exploring Raptor Lake
Before we begin , I have to warn you : if you were here for Alder Lake in any capacity , you are going to feel a bit of déjà vu . Raptor Lake builds on the foundation laid by its predecessor , so it will be worth revisiting familiar soil .
Intel ’s 13th Generation Core processor are built on a hybrid core architecture , comprised of two unlike microarchitectures . effective cores ( or E - core ) are lower - powered gist designed to contend background tasks and to spread out the load of grading , multithreaded workloads . carrying into action cores ( or P - cores ) are processing cores designed for demanding work load , gaming , and single- or lightly threaded chore . While P - cores are hyperthreaded , each E - core represents a individual processing yarn .
This is an important detail to pause on . When we start talking about thread counting on these processors , you may notice while seem at charts that the mathematics is interesting . While AMD leans into a multi - chiplet design , keep the ribbon count and inwardness numeration at 2:1 ratio , Intel ’s monumental plan change how we compare these identification number .
Graphic: Damien Gula / Gizmodo
Take , for example , AMD ’s Ryzen 9 7950X. It is a 16 - core C.P.U. with 32 yarn to mold with . The Core i9 - 13900 K is a 24 - core processor that also has 32 threads to work with . How does that math out ? Like this : of its 24 core , 8 are hyperthreaded atomic number 15 - cores , meaning that they symbolize 16 of the 13900 K ’s 32 threads . The other threads are represented by the 16 einsteinium - essence .
Alder Lake introduced us to this raw way of count cores and threads , but Raptor Lake stack more E - meat into the party . The Core i5 - 13600 K add four more E - cores to its architecture while the Core i9 - 13900 K take aim on eight more ! If you are keeping count , that is double the atomic number 99 - gist of their various predecessors . At the instant , the known processor in the Raptor Lake family have E - cores and P - cores , but if the seriesfollows in the footsteps of its forerunner , we could see thirteenth Generation Core CPUs without eastward - CORE .
That is n’t the only thing that has increased across the generation . The 13th Gen CPUs are receiving excrescence in both L2 and L3 stash as well . The Core i9 - 13900 K get equipped with 32 megabyte L2- and 36 MB L3 stash , an increment of 6 megabyte at L3 and 18 MB at L2 . The Core i5 - 13600 K saw a modest bump of 4 Bachelor of Medicine at L2 – make a motion its total L2 cache to 24 MB . The Core i5 ’s L3 stash , however , more than doubled , impress from 9.5 M to 20 megabyte .
Graphic: Damien Gula / Gizmodo
speak of humble increases , the clock bucket along for P - cores and tocopherol - cores are noteworthy , but not astronomic . For the 13900 super C , the max turbo frequency is listed at 5.8 GHz on phosphorus - cores and 4.3 Gc on tocopherol - cores . That is around 700 MHz on the P - cores and 400 MHz on eastward - cores . The report is different , however , with base clock frequencies . The 13900 K dials back the base oftenness by around 200 MHz . The narration is similar with the Core i5 - 13600 K , lower understructure absolute frequency from the previous generation with a modest uplift in the turbo frequencies – an upheaval of around 200 MHz on the phosphorus - core and 300 MHz on the E - cores .
While frequency uplift is a part of the 13th Gen narrative , it is n’t the whole narration . With more E - Congress of Racial Equality to work with and more knock-down P - core , these processors are going to be demanding more power . That ’s right : if Alder Lake was power - athirst , Raptor Lake is HUNGRY hungry . While the processor ’s base world power rest the same at 125W , the Core i5 jumps from 150W to 181W at maximum turbo power while the Core i9 jumps from 241W to 253W.
Even with this power increase , there is some great news program : Raptor Lake utilizes the same LGA1700 socket as Alder Lake , so this gamey demand is not young to manufacturing business . What is also great word is that Z690 motherboards from the previous genesis will defend 13th Gen processors with the appropriate BIOS update . Newer Z790 motherboards will be released alongside the CPUs with expanded motorbus sustenance for PCIe 5.0 alongside propose features like WiFi 6 and Thunderbolt 4 , just like its predecessor .
Graphic: Damien Gula / Gizmodo
But , that ’s not all .
Unlike AMD ’s “ all - in ” access to DDR5 , Raptor Lake CPUs and Z790 motherboards have options to use either DDR4 or DDR5 . Keep in mind , DDR4 and DDR5 are not interchangeable . Having the option to buy a motherboard that use DDR4 instead of DDR5 could be a cost - saving option for a scheme builder upgrading from a more late chopine . We will verbalize about this later , but it does make the conversation about moving to a fresh platform a flake more alluring .
Now that we have talked about the details , the material question is this : how do they puzzle out ?
Graphic: Damien Gula / Gizmodo
get ’s talk about the numbers .
Performance and Power Comparisons
Much like our follow-up of the Ryzen 7000 Series , we will be running a battery of test that will give us a picture of Raptor Lake ’s performance in day - to - day operations while providing some benchmarks for gaming and originative applications . Keep in mind , we are not doing execution tweaking outside of break away XMP for computer memory optimisation interchangeable to ladder EXPO for AMD ’s CPUs .
When it comes to comparisons , we have an interesting office : the Core i9 - 13900 K is positioned cheeseparing price - Stephen Samuel Wise to the Ryzen 9 7900X at $ 549 than the Ryzen 9 7950X at $ 699 . Since that is the event , we will be including datum from both CPUs as well as data Sarah Jacobsson collected for ourAlder Lakereview . For the Core i5 - 13600 K , we will dribble over the 12600 K ’s data to show improvement from the former generation and we will be drawing comparison with AMD ’s Ryzen 5 7600X.
For our examination terrace , we attempt to keep components as similar as compatibility would allow . Here is the hardware we used : ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z760 EXTREME motherboard , NVIDIA RTX 3090 Founders Edition GPU , 32 GB Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR5 - 6600 RAM , 1 TB WD_Black SN770 M.2 NVMe SSD , NZXT C1000 Gold 1000W PSU , NZXT Kraken Z73 360 mm all - in - one liquid tank with three 120 millimetre fans , and an NZXT H7 elect mid - tower microcomputer case equipped with four 140 millimetre sports fan .
Graphic: Damien Gula / Gizmodo
Now , let ’s see what these thing can do !
Benchmark Breakdown: Productivity
We ran the same suite of software benchmark as we did in our Ryzen 7000 series reviews to showcase single- and multi - thread performance . These semisynthetic benchmark create consistent scenarios to give us a photograph of how each CPU performs the same tasks .
Beginning with Geekbench 5 , we jump to see the uplift from generation to generation . For the Core i5 - 13600 K , we see a ~9.4 % increase over the 12600 K and ~3.9 % over the 12900 kilobyte in unmarried pace project – operations such as WWW navigation , image and text compressing , PDF rendering , and machine encyclopaedism . It did , however , shack behind its contention , the Ryzen 5 7600X , by ~6.7 % .
The Core i9 - 13900 K , however , takes a ~14.5 % leap ahead of its predecessor while go toe - to - toe with the Ryzen 9s , positioning itself within ~1.1 % of the 7950X ’s performance ! Remember : we ’re talking about individual - thread performance here . This is typically the space Intel has been rife while AMD has historically been the king of the cores .
Graphic: Damien Gula / Gizmodo
Geekbench 5 ’s multithread scotch , however , tell a very different fib .
When last we chitchat this mental test , the Ryzen 9 7950X had dominated the 12900 kilobyte by ~28.8 % . With the 13900 kilobyte , Geekbench 5 ’s multi - core , multi - thread benchmarks show Intel leap ~10.5 % onward of AMD ’s flagship . The 13600 K is no slouch either ; with its additional atomic number 99 - cores , the novel Core i5 take an impressive ~34.2 % track over its herald while beating the Ryzen 5 by over 50 % of its functioning within this benchmark . The latter point was not hard to do , however , as we did note that multi - thread surgical operation were not the Ryzen 5 ’s stiff showing .
Moving on to video recording encoding , we moved our testing to Handbrake , converting a 4 KiB video file to a 1080p30 data format . The 13600 K was less one-horse than its predecessor , shaving 40 seconds off of the full clip for encoding , position it in close contention with the 12900 K and the Ryzen 9 7900X. The 13900 K on the other hand shaved 16 seconds off of the 7950X ’s best time — a ~14.4 % improvement over the previous propagation and ~8.5 % improvement over its competition .
Graphic: Damien Gula / Gizmodo
It ’s not all high - fives and home run for the 13900 K ; in Blender , Intel ’s hot new CPU could n’t quite edge out the 7950X. Clocking in at 61 seconds , Team Blue missed out on the crown by one sec . The 13600 K , however , made marked improvement over the previous generation again , place its public presentation in closer competition with the 12900 K and the 7900X. For Intel ’s “ first appearance - level ” CPU , the Core i5 knows how to put in the work – at least , that is the picture we get from our productivity trial !
Benchmark Breakdown: Gaming
In our gaming benchmarks , we ran all of our gaming tests at 1080p to get the clearest picture of the CPU ’s impact on public presentation , confine GPU dependency . These tests were involve from games that had synthetic benchmarks , grant for repeatable , ordered data across a number of different genus Apis .
Our picture in gaming benchmark is far different than what we witness with Zen 4 . While AMD ’s performance was reasonably exchangeable , we saw a distinct contrast between the 13600 K and the 13900K. In each of our gaming benchmarks , Intel ’s 13th Generation Core processors traded setback with Ryzen 7000 . While the numbers across the board were impressive , there is one stand - out worth remark .
In our test of Metro Exodus , there is a subdivision of the bench mark that utilizes ray tracing . Like our Ryzen tests , we did not enable any special vantage within these scans — no DLSS , no ReSizable Bar , no Smart Access Memory . While it only take a lead of 10 frames per 2nd ( ~7.7 % over the 7950X ) , the Core i9 seemed to handle the extra load like a champ .
Graphic: Damien Gula / Gizmodo
The Core i5 - 13600 K did n’t do half defective itself . In each test , it hung with the pack and even beat the contention in some case . Both mainframe put up numbers corresponding to Ryzen 7000 with different applications favoring one squad or the other at 1080p . In play use cases , Raptor Lake provided solid anatomy rate in carrying into action .
There is , however , more to the story .
Energy Efficiency and Thermal Performance
As we were recording our data , we roll up entropy on thermic functioning and electrical power . To keep our central processing unit thermic management consistent with our Ryzen 7000 series reassessment , we usedNZXT ’s Z73 360mmall - in - one liquidness cooler , setting the pump motor to execution modality and face buff to silent mode . This think of that the heart would manoeuvre at about 70 % capacity , then start rage up to 100 % if the CPU temperatures span over 55 ° blow – which happened often . The accompanying radiator and case fan were operate on in unsounded manner – pass at 40 % capacity until 65 ° coke , ramping up to 70 % until it attain 85 ° C , then opening up to 100 % strength at 90 ° speed of light until temperatures came down to fairish levels .
Here is what we launch :
Across the card , the temperature averages brood in the mid to high 40 ° speed of light range over ambient temperatures in most of our gambling tests , similar to the performance we see with the Ryzen 7000 series . However , in some of our productivity trial run like Blender and Handbrake , the Raptor Lake CPUs ply a few degrees hot .
Photo: Damien Gula / Gizmodo
The identification number that are not in these charts are the maximal temperature that we immortalize during testing . It was not rare to see Intel ’s CPUs hit their thermic junction maximum temperature of 100 ° light speed during our benchmarking . Keep in head that we did see rather high temperatures on the AMD side , too . However , there were very few instances where we live over 95 ° coke and , if we did , those were very brief moments .
In our review of Intel ’s Alder Lake CPUs , Sarah Jacobsson noted that while the 12th Generation Core CPUs execute well , their energy efficiency was questionable . My findings with the thirteenth Generation were not much different .
While it is true that the overall operation of both Intel ’s 13th Generation Core CPUs is astoundingly safe , power use has room for melioration . They are postulate and lose out to Zen 4 when it comes to efficiency in a number of cases .
Take Blender for example . While the Core i9 - 13900 K and Ryzen 9 7950X come close in their encoding sentence , the 13900 K required ~17 % more power than the 7950X to achieve alike carrying out . The situation with the Core i5 - 13600 K is like — higher performance at a higher power draw . We see this in our gaming data , too , with Far Cry 5 serving as our most uttermost case .
In this benchmark , the Ryzen 5 7600X had an average power draw of 64W with the Core i5 at 102W and the Core i9 more than duplicate the Ryzen 5 ’s ability draw at 143W. This is an passing short bench mark – and those are the average . That translated into a 33 % dispute in skeleton rates in favour of the Core i9 and 23 % for the Core i5 . That is a meaning return and important amount of power , but it was also the Ryzen 5 ’s weakest execute benchmark . When we start to look at the power draw and performance numbers for benchmark like Wolfenstein , the 7600X drew ~30 % less power for similar performance between it and the 13600K.
Again , we are await at dumbfounding functioning , but the cost of that performance is a higher overall power draw .
You Are Here: Raptor Lake, Raphael, and the CPU Arms Race
As consumers and personal computer enthusiast , we get hold ourselves in an incredibly interesting position . While AMD ’s new platform released with unbelievable performance over the previous multiplication and showed some advantage in comparative efficiency , that performance has been coupled with the awkwardness of take on a new platform . The debut fee – outside of the fiscal monetary value – is that you , the final stage user , dish as another layer of product testing while the issues are iron out out . This , however , is where Intel has an advantage : Alder Lake was the novel platform , but Raptor Lake is the polished improvement .
Alongside Intel ’s 13th Generation Core CPUs are a number of supporting products and platforms that have had 11 months to get on . LGA1700 is not a new socket and DDR5 has already had integration with the prior generation of CPUs , so manufacturers have had that much time to screen out issues and immaturity of a unexampled political program . Pair that with BIOS update to continue future reenforcement and you have an interesting proffer to raise .
One of my biggest criticisms of the Ryzen 7000 Series was that the Ryzen 5 7600X , while a star CPU , did not release with enough support in the realm of budget RAM and motherboard options . Though it is ever - so - slenderly more expensive than its contest , Core i5 - 13600 K does not have the 7600X ’s problem . With an intact generation of year - old Z690 and B660 motherboards that are likely a microcode update away from supporting it as well as the selection to stay with DDR4 , the monetary value of entry is abject . This is incredible news for you , the consumer .
What is even better is that both companies are pushing their technology to faster speed , more powerful performance , and higher levels of efficiency . The more they keep fight each other , the more we become the beneficiaries of better products – that is , at least , as long as the cost of engineering remains accessible .
Final Thoughts
Raptor Lake symbolize a solid maturation of Intel ’s hybrid architecture and an optimistic look at where next CPUs might go . The gains in execution over the past generation are arresting and the competition within the multi - threading space is incredibly promising .
As far as value go , Intel made an unbelievably calculate determination to keep the cost of their flagship CPU at the same price point as the previous multiplication – $ 589 USD . The performance of the Core i9 - 13900 K keeps in stride with the Ryzen 9 7950X at a lower cost while the Core i5 - 13600 K blows past its nearest competition . The Core i5 is $ 30 USD more expensive than the old generation but punches above its weight stratum . With what we saw out of both mainframe , I am fantastically singular about the performance of the Core i7 - 13700K. I guess we will have to waitress until they are released into the natural state !
For system constructor appear to move to the LGA1700 platform , Alder Lake paved the fashion for a more stable experience out of the logic gate . And , if you are n’t plan on going all - in on DDR5 or Z790 , there are some loose style to save money on slenderly former technology while gaining accession to higher - perform central processing unit technology offer by Raptor Lake . If you have been waiting to upgrade and you are considering an Intel build , this could be a great prison term to plunk in .
Oh , and one final art object of advice before I close out . If you are considering fancier - grade parts like the 13900 super acid , please do yourself a favor and purchase a reliable , gamey - wattage power supply while you ’re at it . You ’re going to need it , specially if you mate it with anRTX 4090 ! Then again , you might want to consider a bigger microcomputer case , too .
The product discussed in this clause including the CPUs , motherboard , and RAM were provided by the manufacturers for the purposes of review article .
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