Intel Launches 16 New 13th-Gen Raptor Lake Desktop CPUs: Higher Pricing and Power Consumption

Intel announced 16 new Raptor Lake CPUs spanning its 65W mainstream PC chips and 35W “T-Series” categories today, broadening its roster of 13th-Gen processors that currently dominate our list of Best CPUs for gaming and our CPU benchmark hierarchy. The new chips extend from the Core i3 to high-end Core i9 families and come with more cores and higher frequencies along with higher gen-on-gen pricing, mirroring the price increases we noticed last night with Intel’s 12th-gen chips. They also have significantly increased peak power consumption compared to their predecessors.

In many respects, Raptor Lake is an iteration of the microarchitectures found in the previous-gen Alder Lake chips, but with expansive improvements that yield impressive performance gains. Even though Intel still uses the ‘Intel 7’ process node, it leverages advances in a newer revision of the silicon to push clock speeds higher while improving power efficiency. Intel also etches the cores on a new, larger die with more cores and L3 cache and exposes previously unused L2 cache. These enhancements have given Raptor Lake a tangible performance lead over AMD’s competing Ryzen 7000 chips.

Most of Intel’s new 13th-gen processors announced today come with the same Raptor Cove architecture as the flagship models that launched last year, but some of the Core i5 and the lone Core i3 model reportedly come with the same die and architecture used for the 12th-Gen Alder Lake CPUs, albeit bulked up with more generous core counts and/or higher clock rates to enable higher levels of performance.

As we saw with the launch of the unlocked full-power K-series chips last year, Intel has also significantly dialed up its peak power consumption to keep the performance edge over AMD’s competing Ryzen 7000 processors. So, while Intel’s new chips slot into the traditional 35W and 65W envelopes that the company uses for its budget-geared lineup, they consume more power and will generate more heat than their predecessors.

New B760 motherboards will accompany the 65W Raptor Lake chips to market, but they don’t bring many meaningful improvements over the prior-gen B660 lineup. Raptor Lake still maintains backward compatibility with existing 600-series motherboards, providing a value path that will mesh well with the lower-end processors (make sure you have the right BIOS). 

Intel has also preserved support for DDR4 memory, a key cost-saving measure that gives the company a big advantage over AMD’s pricey DDR5-only platforms, while also offering support for DDR5 memory. However, Intel has dropped peak DDR5 speeds down a notch on its lower-end models.

Intel 13th-Gen 65W Raptor Lake Specifications and Pricing

Here we can see the breakdown for the highest-end Core i9-13900 and Core i7-13700 models that come with the new Raptor Lake die. As you can see, the new ‘non-K’ chips come with the same core counts as their full-fledged counterparts but have significantly lower clock speeds (particularly for base frequencies) that allow Intel to squeeze them into a lower 65W Processor Base Power (PBP) envelope. These two models also have a 219W peak power (Maximum Turbo Power – MTP), representing a 17W gen-on-gen increase for Core i9 and a 37W increase for Core i7.

Prices have also increased by 10% over the debut pricing of the previous-gen chips. As a result, you’ll pay $54 more for the Core i9 and $49 more for the Core i7 model. As before, you can opt for the graphics-less F-series models to save some cash.

All 65W chips aren’t ‘officially’ overclockable, but bear in mind that some motherboard vendors have developed workarounds that allow full overclocking on these models. Intel has turned a blind eye to the unsanctioned practice, and these motherboards tend to only carry a small premium.

The lower end of the 65W product stack reportedly has multiple SKUs that leverage Alder Lake silicon, but Intel hasn’t officially confirmed which SKUs ship with the older design (we’ll update when we get a response).

The Core i5 and i3 models all have a peak memory speed of DDR5-4800, lower than the DDR5-5600 supported by the pricier variants, and the same cache-per-core configurations as Alder Lake. This means the chips don’t carry the improvements we see in Raptor Lake, all but confirming that some of these models (if not all) use the Alder Lake die.

Intel has offset that by bulking up the entire non-K Core i5 lineup with E-Cores, a first, which will significantly improve performance in threaded workloads while also offloading the P-Cores for more important tasks. Paired with the higher gen-on-gen clock speeds, these models will deliver a big performance boost over the prior-gen models and provide stiff competition for AMD’s soon-to-be-launched 65W Ryzen 7000 CPUs. Additionally, it is noteworthy that Intel has exposed more performance with Raptor Lake by upgrading the firmware of the integrated microcontroller that debuted with Alder Lake. As such, some of these types of changes to the Alder Lake tuning might be employed in these lower-end models.

We see even bigger peak power increases of 37W for the Core i5-13600 and 31W for the 13500 and 13400. Meanwhile, power remains the same on the Core i3-13100, but this chip is nearly identical to its predecessor, with the same number of cores and a mere 200 MHz increase in peak frequency.

Again, we see the 10% price increase compared to the debut pricing of the previous-gen models, which is a particular disappointment in these cost-sensitive price ranges.

Intel 13th-Gen Raptor Lake Benchmarks

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Intel made a few performance projections, but as with all vendor-provided benchmarks, you should take them with a grain of salt. Intel claims an 11% improvement in single-threaded and 34% improvement in multi-threaded workloads, which seems reasonable given the increased cores, frequencies, and power envelopes of the models in question. We’ll put this to the test soon.

Intel 13th-Gen Raptor Lake T-Series 35W Specifications and Pricing

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Finally, here you can see the 35W T-series lineup. These chips are functionally the same as their counterparts above but come with a much lower power envelope to tailor them for specific segments, like fanless PCs, small form-factor rigs, HTPCs, and the like. The Core i9 model retains the same peak of 106W, but the Core i5-13600T and 13500T models come with an 18W increase in power, while the 13700T and 13400T see an 8W increase in peak power.

We’re still digging for a few details about the chips, which we’ll add as we receive answers. Intel says these chips will be on shelves globally today. Look to these pages for reviews soon.