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

The 13th-Gen Intel 'Raptor Lake' $589 Core i9-13900K and the $319 Core i5-13600K bring groundbreaking levels of performance to their respective price points, with a ~20% generational jump in gaming performance taking the lead over competing chips from AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series. We tested all three of the new Raptor Lake chips with the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 to find the best CPU for gaming and the new leader of our CPU benchmark hierarchy. Raptor Lake’s performance gains come from record-high clock speeds that stretch up to 5.8 GHz, with a 6 GHz model coming, while Intel’s generous sprinkling of more cores throughout its product stack gives it the lead in core counts for the first time since AMD’s Ryzen debuted back in 2017.

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 explosive performance gains. Even though Intel still uses the ‘Intel 7’ process node, it leveraged impressive advances in a newer revision of the silicon to push clock speeds higher while improving power efficiency. Intel also etched the cores on a new, larger die with more cores and L3 cache and exposed previously unused L2 cache.

Paired with fine-grained tuning and expanded use of features in the core, Raptor Lake yields the types of performance gains we would normally only expect from the transition to a new process node. Those types of advances are needed as Intel attempts to fend off the 5nm Ryzen 7000 processors, like the Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X, that recently took the lead over Alder Lake.

Like its predecessor, Raptor Lake supports the latest connectivity standards, including PCIe 5.0 and DDR5, with the latter now supporting faster official speeds of DDR5-5600. Intel also preserves DDR4 support for less-expensive build options — a pronounced advantage over AMD’s Ryzen 7000, especially on midrange options. Raptor Lake will also drop into existing motherboards to offer an upgrade path for Alder Lake users, but new 700-series motherboards offer slightly expanded connectivity options. Intel also introduced more CPU overclocking features.

Of course, there are caveats. Intel’s new chips are its most power-efficient yet, but like AMD, Intel has taken a power-be-damned approach to regain leadership, dialing up its power limits for all the desktop PC chips. That means the heat can be hard to control, so you’ll need to plan for a beefy cooling solution. On the flip side, you can now easily overclock to the highest clock rates we’ve ever seen, and that's even without using exotic cooling. For instance, we dialed in 5.6 GHz all-core overclocks with relative ease with an AIO watercooler.

Intel did raise the price of the Core i5-13600K model, but it kept the same pricing for the Core i7 and i9. With the company’s continued aggressive chip pricing and options for lower-priced platforms and memory, the 13th-Gen Raptor Lake processors are now the best CPUs for gaming and most other work, even if they don’t take the outright performance lead in all threaded workloads.

Intel 13th-Gen Raptor Lake Specifications and Pricing

Intel's initial Raptor Lake launch includes three overclockable chips, and each has two variants, giving you the option for cheaper graphics-less KF-series models. Intel is expected to release the remaining 16 processors in the lineup early next year. Just like the previous-gen chips, the 13th-Gen Raptor Lake processors come with a mix of both big performance cores (p-cores) for latency-sensitive work and small efficiency cores (e-cores) for threaded and background applications. The e-cores stick with the same Gracemont architecture as before, but the p-cores move from the Golden Cove design to Raptor Cove. We'll cover the architecture more in-depth after the benchmarks.

The 24-core 32-thread $589 Core i9-13900K will square off with AMD's 16-core $699 Ryzen 9 7950X, so Intel has a pricing advantage. The Core i9-13900K has the highest clock rates of the new chips, with a 600 MHz generational improvement bringing it to a 5.8 GHz peak that sets a record for mainstream desktop PCs. Intel employs Thermal Velocity Boost and Turbo Boost 3.0 tech for the Raptor Lake Core i9 models, so the 13900K will have to meet certain temperature (under 70C) and power conditions to boost to 5.8 GHz on two cores. Intel has also raised the boost frequencies for both p-cores and e-cores on all Raptor Lake chips, but reduced the base clocks by 200 MHz. The latter shouldn't mean much in practical application — this is done to manage the Base Turbo Power (BTP) rating.

The 13900K has the same 125W BTP as before, but Intel increased the Maximum Turbo Power (MTP) by 12W, bringing it to 253W. That’s a new height for desktop processors, outstripping Ryzen 7000’s peak 230W rating.

The Core i9-13900K has eight more e-cores than its predecessor, delivering much more threaded horsepower and technically taking the core count lead on the mainstream desktop PC over the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X. In contrast, AMD’s design employs only cores that are analogous to ‘performance cores,’ so we’ll have to look to the benchmarks to suss out the winners instead of relying upon core counts alone. The e-cores come with a 400 MHz increase to the boost clock, bringing them to 4.3 GHz. Even though the e-cores use the same Gracemont architecture, Intel claims that changes to the caching policy and other fine-grained optimizations (more below) now yield the same IPC and frequency as the original 14nm Skylake cores, but at lower power.

The Core i9-13900K is the only Raptor Lake chip to come with Intel's Adaptive Boost Technology (ABT). In a nutshell, ABT allows Core i9 processors to dynamically boost to higher all-core frequencies based upon available thermal headroom and electrical conditions, so the peak frequencies can vary. It also allows the chip to operate at 100C during normal operation to extract the utmost performance from your setup. We cover this more on the third page.

The $409 Core i7-13700K received a 400 MHz p-core frequency bump to 5.4 GHz, an additional four e-cores for a total of eight, and a 400 MHz e-core boost to 4.2 GHz. Intel also increased the MTP for this chip to 253W, a 63W increase over the prior-gen Core i7-12700K (+33%).

The $319 Core i5-13600K has four more e-cores than the prior gen, and Intel increased the p-core clocks by 200 MHz to reach 5.1 GHz. Intel also bumped the e-cores up by 300 MHz to achieve a 3.9 GHz boost. Naturally, this means the chip will consume more power — the 13600K also has a 31W higher MTP than the prior gen, weighing in at 181W (+20%).

The Core i5-13600K looks to be the most impressive Raptor Lake chip if you’re willing to overclock, as we easily attained a 5.6 GHz overclock that nearly matches the stock Core i9-13900K’s gaming performance. You’ll have to pay for the privilege, though. The $319 Core i3-13600K is the lone chip to receive a price increase; both the full-fledged model and the graphics-less 13600KF are $30 more expensive than the prior gen. Intel has confirmed that e-cores are also coming to more of the Raptor Lake Core i5 lineup. Currently, only the Core i5 'K' Alder Lake model has four e-cores, while the others do not.

Some of the improvements apply to all three chips. For example, Intel increased the L2 cache from 1.25MB to 2MB for each p-core and doubled the amount of L2 cache for each cluster of e-cores to 4MB. The amount of L3 cache has also increased due to adding more e-core clusters, each of which has an adjacent L3 cache slice as part of the design. That leads to cache capacity increases for all K-series Raptor Lake chips.

Intel has increased its DDR5 memory support up to 5600 MT/s if you use one DIMM per channel (1DPC), a big increase over the prior 4800 MT/s speed with Alder Lake. Just as importantly, Intel increased 2DPC speeds up to 4400 MT/s, an improvement over the previous-gen 3600 MT/s. Raptor Lake also continues to support DDR4 memory, which Intel predicts will coexist in the market with DDR5 until the end of 2024. This approach ensures a value option for Intel platforms, unlike AMD's all-in approach with DDR5.

Both Raptor Lake and Alder Lake drop into motherboards with the LGA 1700 socket, so they’ll both work with existing 600-series or new 700-series chipsets. Intel says that, on a like-for-like basis, you shouldn’t see any performance differences if you use a previous-gen 600-series motherboard for Raptor Lake. As usual, Intel will bring its Z-series (Z790, in this case) motherboards to market first, with the value-centric B- and H-series coming when it launches the rest of the Raptor Lake lineup.

The 700-series motherboards bring minor improvements over the 600-series, but Intel has increased the number of PCIe 4.0 lanes hanging off the chipset to 20, an increase of eight additional lanes. Intel also added support for one more USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 200Gps port, bringing the total to five. As before, the Raptor Lake chip itself supports 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 and four lanes of PCIe 4.0 for a storage device.

Intel doesn’t include a cooler with the Raptor Lake processors but recommends a 280mm AIO watercooler or air equivalent (or greater). Existing LGA 1700 coolers are compatible with the new Raptor Lake motherboards but bear in mind that the performance of your cooler can significantly limit performance, so it's best to overprovision. You’ll need to ensure you have a beefy cooler for stock operation with the Core i9 and i7 models, and even an overclocked Core i5-13600K can challenge lower-end 240mm AIOs.

The Raptor Lake iGPU is based on the same Xe-LP Gen 12.2 architecture found with Alder Lake. Aside from minor clock speed improvements, there aren’t any changes to the iGPU, so you shouldn’t expect any meaningful gaming performance.

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