Intel Core i9-13900KF QS Benchmarked at 6.1 GHz Using Liquid Cooling

Intel CPU benchmarks
(Image credit: Intel)

A video test featuring what is claimed to be an Intel Core i9-13900KF Qualification Sample (QS) has been published online. We have seen videos and benchmarks of purported Core i9-13900 CPUs previously, but this time around the chip is being cooled using a highly capable liquid loop chiller. It was found that the new Raptor Lake flagship’s P-cores could run stably at up to 6.1 GHz in some benchmarks, using this thermal solution.

Bilibili PC tech social media star Extreme Player has returned with some more testing, and musings, with regard to his purported Intel Core i9-13900KF QS chip. The last time we saw this fellow he tested his Raptor Lake flagship-to-be against an Alder Lake equivalent, namely the Core i9-12900KF. This time, Extreme Player wanted to look at how well the Core i9-13900KF QS could perform with a bit of tuning and the use of a liquid cooler.

The key findings of Extreme Player were nicely surmised by Twitter’s HXL. However, we’ve put together a comparison that folds-in the previous air-cooled 13900 results from Extreme Player.

Swipe to scroll horizontally

Bench / i9 CPU

12900KF

13900K

13900KF liquid cooled

CPU-Z nT

11,348

16,606

19,551 (6.1 GHz)

Cinebench R23 nT

26,939

37,385

42,790 (5.8 GHz)

Data from Extreme Player videos prior and new.

You can see the commercially available Alder Lake CPU pitted against the new Raptor Lake equivalent QS model. The liquid cooling enables some good stable overclocks according to Extreme Player’s tests. In the table the nT (multithreaded) tests show stable all-core frequencies (performance cores) of 6.1 GHz in CPU-Z and 5.8 GHz in Cinebench. For the air cooled Core i9-13900, the all-core boost was 5.5 GHz. Meanwhile, the Alder Lake chip has an all-P-core boost of 5.2 GHz.

Other key findings from Extreme Player, using a liquid cooled Core i9-13900 plugged into an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Apex, were that the Efficiency cores, or E-cores could run stably at up to 5.2 GHz all-core in CPU-Z, and up to 4.7 GHz all-core in Cinebench R23.

Later in the Chinese language spoken/subtitled video Extreme Player does some memory testing, and takes a look at the performance of some other purported Intel Raptor Lake samples such as the i7-13700K QS, and the i5-13600K QS. With these early chips, BIOS files, and pre-700 Series chipsets we don’t think it's a bit early for these results. In fact, you should probably take all of these early results with a grain of salt, considering they're from a claimed chip not yet ready for release.

Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

  • -Fran-
    How many hundreds of liters/gallons were used to cool this thing? :D

    Reminds me of the infamous Intel presentation for the... What was it? The i7 7800X? I can't remember xD

    Regards.
    Reply
  • Eximo
    Enough tweaking and playing loose with the voltages, sure. But I do wonder at the power consumption of all those cores.

    I think the i7 is going to once again be the popular choice. All those efficiency cores are neat, but you would need some seriously threaded applications to make use of them.
    Reply
  • RodroX
    "For the air cooled Core i9-13900, the all-core boost was 5.5 GHz. "
    I would really love to see this duplicated by independent reviewers, once this CPU hit the street of course.
    Reply
  • Specter0420
    Let's be honest with ourselves here... If you are shelling out the money for one of these rigs with something like an RTX 4090, you could NOT care less if your PC's electricity and heat costs you $22 per year vs $40 per year, or if your loop holds $0.01 of water vs $0.03.
    You just care if it can provide 90FPS+ with modern VR (Reverb G2 or above) in flight simulators like DCS World, MSFS, IL2, XP12, etc. Nothing on Earth can can do this yet at great-to-max settings, especially in multiplayer DCS and MSFS.

    I'm not sure why VR Flight Sims get ignored by Toms' benchmarks, they're one of the only home workloads that hardware will fail to provide an artifact free (90 FPS+) VR experience, with any available overclocked CPU\RAM. Sure VR flight simmers are a niche group, but VR simming is a single-to-two core CPU taxing workload that is on the bleeding edge as far high raw CPU performance requirements\CPU frametimes. Below 90FPS (or 80 depending on HMD) in flight sims is simply unacceptable if you notice the ASW\Motion Smoothing artifacts like most of us. ASW\MS is designed for common VR game distances of less than a 200M. Less than a 200M is nothing in a flight simulator so we get bad artifacts everywhere at less than 90 FPS.

    It's just frustrating waiting for the world to catch up to our needs and all the professional hardware benchmarking sites pretending like we don't exist.
    Reply
  • escksu
    -Fran- said:
    How many hundreds of liters/gallons were used to cool this thing? :D

    Reminds me of the infamous Intel presentation for the... What was it? The i7 7800X? I can't remember xD

    Regards.

    The article only say chilled liquid cooler. Didn't mention LN2 or DICE... So, I guess they are simply throwing ice into a large pail... Nothing new. When I used to OC alot back then, I will use an aquarium pump in a pail then throw in lots of ice. The water will stay chilled at around 2-3C. CPU will be around 10-15C.....

    Once the ice melts, just drain some water and throw in more ice.

    Of course, its nowhere as cold as DICE or LN2 but its a cheap way and it can last a few hours. Enough for several rounds of benchmarking.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    escksu said:
    The article only say chilled liquid cooler. Didn't mention LN2 or Dry Ice... So, I guess they are simply throwing ice into a large pail... Nothing new. When I used to OC alot back then, I will use an aquarium pump in a pail then throw in lots of ice. The water will stay chilled at around 2-3C. CPU will be around 10-15C.....

    Once the ice melts, just drain some water and throw in more ice.
    I think "liquid loop chiller" is a bad automated translation and the tester was using a simple liquid loop cooler. Everywhere else in the article it just says liquid cooled. The recent leak of an "ultra turbo" mode from the factory would indicate you should not need some exotic cooling to get above 6GHz, or the feature would be pretty useless. 350W should be fine with a typical custom loop cooler.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    Eximo said:
    Enough tweaking and playing loose with the voltages, sure. But I do wonder at the power consumption of all those cores.

    I think the i7 is going to once again be the popular choice. All those efficiency cores are neat, but you would need some seriously threaded applications to make use of them.
    350W would be a good starting first guess.

    Intel's Raptor Lake Reportedly Has 350W Turbo Mode, But Only on New Motherboards
    Reply
  • escksu
    spongiemaster said:
    I think "liquid loop chiller" is a bad automated translation and the tester was using a simple liquid loop cooler. Everywhere else in the article it just says liquid cooled. The recent leak of an "ultra turbo" mode from the factory would indicate you should not need some exotic cooling to get above 6GHz, or the feature would be pretty useless. 350W should be fine with a typical custom loop cooler.

    Hmm, you are right. Its likely that its just a normal liquid cooler. There is also an Intel Cryo cooler with an additional peltier. But if it can really hit 6GHz, it would be awesome.

    Long ago, 5GHz was like the "holy grail" for overclockers. For a very very long time, the barrier seems unbreakable except for a few golden chips.

    Its only till more recently when chips could consistenly hit above 5GHz. So, it will be really nice to see 6GHz barrier breached!!
    Reply
  • bit_user
    escksu said:
    Its only till more recently when chips could consistenly hit above 5GHz. So, it will be really nice to see 6GHz barrier breached!!
    Are you sure about that? I don't keep track of this stuff, but I think 6 GHz has been breached for a while. I think they even got close with a Pentium 4.

    Anyway, while searching for that, I tripped over this: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/fx-6300-breakes-8ghz
    Definitely the fastest overclock I've ever heard of.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Aside from the cooling setup used, another key detail missing is the amount of time this clock speed was sustained.
    Reply