Productivity Benchmarks on Intel Core i9-13900KS — The TLDR:
We can boil down productivity application performance into two broad categories: single- and multi-threaded. These slides show the geometric mean of performance in several of our most important tests in each category, but be sure to look at the expanded results below.
Overall the same general trends that we saw in our gaming benchmarks appear in our application testing — the Core i9-13900KS does nothing to change the competitive positioning against AMD's Ryzen, and while the 13900KS is the fastest chip in the world in both single- and multi-threaded work after overclocking, its high price tag makes the slight gains simply not worth it.
The Ryzen 9 7950X clings to its lead in multi-threaded work over the Core i9-13900KS by a mere 0.5%, but that's in the noise of the benchmarks. We should consider these two chips tied. Overclocking flips the advantage back in Intel's favor, but this is also close enough to call a tie. We also see slight gains over the Core i9-13900K in multi-threaded work, but this isn't worth the increased pricing.
Flipping over to single-threaded work reveals that the 13900KS holds a clear win over all contenders — it is 14% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X and 2% faster than the standard 13900K. Still, that's a relatively slim delta over the standard 13900K.
You'll have to accept severe performance tradeoffs if you opt for AMD's fastest gaming chip, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The 5800X3D is significantly slower than the newer chips because it comes with the previous-gen Zen 3 architecture. The extra dollop of L3 cache doesn't impart any meaningful speedups in most standard desktop PC applications. If you're looking for an X3D chip, wait for the 7000X3D chips that launch next month.
| Tom's Hardware | Multi-Thread | Single-Thread |
| $699 — Core i9-13900KS / OC | 100% / 104% | 100% / 101% |
| $589 — Core i9-13900K / OC | 99% / 102% | 98% / 96% |
| $569 — Ryzen 9 7950X / OC | 100% / 103% | 88% / 89% |
| $409 — Core i7-13700K / OC | 79% / 83% | 91% / 94% |
| $474 — Ryzen 9 7900X | 80% | 87% |
| $349 — Ryzen 7 7700X / OC | 56% / 57% | 86% / 86% |
| $365 — Ryzen 7 5800X3D | 42% | 66% |
Rendering Benchmarks on Intel Core i9-13900KS
Intel's Raptor Lake rivals or beats AMD's finest in multi-threaded productivity applications at every price point. These results, like many of the results throughout our other application tests below, mirror the established trends of the KS slightly extending the lead relative to the 13900K. As such, we'll have limited commentary for the application benchmarks.
Encoding Benchmarks on Intel Core i9-13900KS
Most encoders tend to be either heavily threaded or almost exclusively single-threaded — it takes an agile chip to master both disciplines.
Adobe, Web Browsing, Office and Productivity on Intel Core i9-13900KS
The ubiquitous web browser is one of the most frequently used applications. These latency-sensitive tests tend to be lightly threaded, so a fast response time is critical.
Compilation, Compression, AI Chess Engines, AVX-512 Performance on Intel Core i9-13900KS
This selection of tests runs the gamut from the exceedingly branchy code in the LLVM compilation workload to the massively parallel molecular dynamics simulation code in NAMD to encryption and compression/decompression performance. Y-cruncher computes Pi with the AVX instruction set, making for an exceedingly demanding benchmark.
- MORE: AMD vs Intel
- MORE: Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 All We Know
- MORE: Raptor Lake All We Know
