Intel Core i9-13900KS Review: The World's First 6 GHz 320W CPU

The fastest and most power hungry PC chip ever.

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Core i9-13900KS
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Paying the 6 GHz Tax

The $699 Core i9-13900KS Special Edition is the fastest gaming chip in the world with its record-setting 6 GHz peak turbo clock. However, for all but extreme overclockers, collectors, and the well-heeled looking to build the ultimate system at any cost, the costly chip's relatively small performance advantage over the vanilla 13900K isn't worth the $110 upcharge.

Below, we have the geometric mean of our gaming test suite at 1080p and 1440p and a cumulative measure of performance in single- and multi-threaded applications. We conducted our gaming tests with an Nvidia RTX 4090, so performance deltas will shrink with lesser cards and higher resolution and fidelity settings.

Paul Alcorn
Paul Alcorn
Editor-in-Chief

Paul Alcorn is the Editor-in-Chief for Tom's Hardware US. He also writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage, and enterprise hardware.

40 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Brian D Smith
    Less 'overclocking' and more on 'underclocking' articles please.

    That would be helpful for the ever growing segment who does NOT need the testosterone rush of having the 'fastest' ... and wants more info on the logical underclocking to...well, do things like get the most out of a CPU without the burden of water-cooling, it's maintenance and chance of screwing up their expensive systems.

    These CPU's and new systems would be flying off the shelves much faster than they are if only people did not have to take such measures for all the heat they generate. It's practically gone from being able to 'fry an egg' on a CPU to 'roasting a pig'. :(
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Seems like the article got a new comment thread, somehow. The original thread was:

    https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/intel-core-i9-13900ks-review-the-worlds-first-6-ghz-320w-cpu.3794179/

    I'm guessing because it had previously been classified as a News article and is now tagged as a Review.
    Reply
  • letmepicyou
    Why doesn't somebody put this thing behind the Corsair H170i Elite?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Thanks for the thorough review, @PaulAlcorn !

    Some of the benchmarks are so oddly lopsided in Intel's favor that I think it'd be interesting to run them in a VM and trap the CPUID instruction. Then, have it mis-report the CPU as a Genuine Intel of some Skylake-X vintage (because it also had AVX-512) and see if you get better performance than the default behavior.

    For the benchmarks that favor AMD, you could try disabling AVX-512, to see if that's why.

    Whatever the reason, it would be really interesting to know why some benchmarks so heavily favor one CPU family or another. I'd bet AMD and Intel are both doing this sort of competitive analysis, in their respective labs.
    Reply
  • letmepicyou
    bit_user said:
    Thanks for the thorough review, @PaulAlcorn !

    Some of the benchmarks are so oddly lopsided in Intel's favor that I think it'd be interesting to run them in a VM and trap the CPUID instruction. Then, have it mis-report the CPU as a Genuine Intel of some Skylake-X vintage (because it also had AVX-512) and see if you get better performance than the default behavior.

    For the benchmarks that favor AMD, you could try disabling AVX-512, to see if that's why.

    Whatever the reason, it would be really interesting to know why some benchmarks so heavily favor one CPU family or another. I'd bet AMD and Intel are both doing this sort of competitive analysis, in their respective labs.
    Well, we've seen the video card manufacturers code drivers to give inflated benchmark results in the past. Is it so outlandish to think Intel or AMD might make alterations in their microcode or architecture in favor of high benchmark scores vs being overall faster?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    letmepicyou said:
    Is it so outlandish to think Intel or AMD might make alterations in their microcode or architecture in favor of high benchmark scores vs being overall faster?
    Optimizing the microcode for specific benchmarks is risky, because you don't know that it won't blow up in your face with some other workload that becomes popular in the next year.

    That said, I was wondering whether AMD tuned its branch predictor on things like 7-zip's decompression algorithm, or if it just happens to work especially well on it.

    To be clear, what I'm most concerned about is that some software is rigged to work well on Intel CPUs (or AMD, though less likely). Intel has done this before, in some of their 1st party libraries (Math Kernel Library, IIRC). And yes, we've seen games use libraries that effectively do the same thing for GPUs (who can forget when Nvidia had a big lead in tessellation performance?).
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    Intel: "We need a faster chip"
    eng 1: what if we make it hotter & uncontrollably force power into it?
    eng 2: what if we try soemthign else that doesnt involve using guzzling power as answer?

    intel: eng1 you're a genius!
    Reply
  • bit_user
    hotaru251 said:
    Intel: "We need a faster chip"
    eng 1: what if we make it hotter & uncontrollably force power into it?
    eng 2: what if we try soemthign else that doesnt involve using guzzling power as answer?

    intel: eng1 you're a genius!
    Part of the problem might be in Intel's manufacturing node. That could limit the solution space for delivering competitive performance, especially when it also needs to be profitable. Recall that Intel 7 not EUV, while TSMC has been using EUV since N7.
    Reply
  • froggx
    Brian D Smith said:
    Less 'overclocking' and more on 'underclocking' articles please.

    That would be helpful for the ever growing segment who does NOT need the testosterone rush of having the 'fastest' ... and wants more info on the logical underclocking to...well, do things like get the most out of a CPU without the burden of water-cooling, it's maintenance and chance of screwing up their expensive systems.

    These CPU's and new systems would be flying off the shelves much faster than they are if only people did not have to take such measures for all the heat they generate. It's practically gone from being able to 'fry an egg' on a CPU to 'roasting a pig'. :(
    Intel has at least once in the past disabled the ability to undervolt. Look up the "plundervolt" vulnerability. Basically around 7th and 8th gen CPUs it was discovered that under very specific conditions that most users would never encounter, undervolting allowed some kind of exploit. The solution: push a windows update preventing CPU from being set below stock voltage. I have a kaby lake in a laptop that was undervolted a good 0.2v, knocked a good 10°C off temps. One day it started running hotter and surprise! I can still overvolt it just fine though, I guess that's what matters for laptops. Essentially, as useful as undervolting can be, Intel doesn't see it as something worthwhile compared to "security."
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    bit_user said:
    Part of the problem might be in Intel's manufacturing node. That could limit the solution space for delivering competitive performance, especially when it also needs to be profitable. Recall that Intel 7 not EUV, while TSMC has been using EUV since N7.
    Being able to withstand higher extremes is a sign of better manufacturing not worse.
    Intel CPUs can take a huge amount of W and also of Vcore without blowing up, these are signs of quality.
    TSMC getting better is how AMD was able to double the W in this generation.
    You don't have to push it just because it is pushable.
    jv3uZ5VlnngView: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv3uZ5Vlnng
    Reply