Intel thirteenth Gen Review

Who would imagine that Intel is the bang for the buck king? But wait, there’s more. With the discharge of the thirteenth gen Raptor Lake desktop CPUs, they’re also the gaming performance king, making Ryzen 7000’s reign the shortest in recent memory.

The Architecture

While AMD kicked off this generation with some big platform changes, Intel’s remained on their LGA 1700 socket where they’ve had a solid yr behind the scenes to refine their hybrid architecture on a comparatively mature platform by now, which is not to say they are not bringing some big gains.

First up is the improvements to their Intel 7 manufacturing process, which contributed to a large bump in core counts in comparison with last generation. Each the 13900K and the 13600K got double the variety of efficiency or E cores, and your complete lineup saw big bumps in on dye cache, which is great for workloads like gaming. They usually boosted up clock speeds too.

On that note, the subsequent big improvement is to memory compatibility. Intel has moved from official support for a poultry DDR5 4,800, all the best way as much as DDR5 5,600 with XMP, extending that to a whopping 7,200 mega transfer per second, and that’s out of the box.

From talking with memory manufacturers, we predict to see even faster memory kits in the long run that may benefit from Raptor Lake’s second generation DDR5 controller.

The Chipset

Their updated Z790 chipset has some tricks up its sleeve as well, giving thirteenth gen chips access to more PCI Express Gen 4 lanes for prime speed storage and extra USB 20 gigabit per second ports, but that is not the perfect thing about it to be honest. The very best thing about it’s you haven’t got to purchase it.

thirteenth gen CPUs are backwards compatible with 600 series motherboards after a BIOS update, they usually’re compatible with DDR4 memory, dramatically reducing the general platform cost for upgraders, making Intel the worth play this generation, but provided that it has the performance to maintain up with AMD. So how briskly is it?

Out testing setup

To assist each platform to place its best foot forward, we paired them with the perfect kits of RAM as advisable by each manufacturer. We also updated our bench to the brand latest and beastly RTX 4090. So saying bye-bye to bottlenecks and hello to some spicy numbers.

Gaming Benchmarks

At 1080p, which we used for many of our benchmarking to amplify CPU bottlenecks, we saw AMD rip outta the gate with a narrow win in “CS:Go.” But I mean with the highest three CPUs all bottlenecked, it’s not likely a meaningful win. Notable here though is the 13600K leading the last gen flagship, 12900K. Could this be a trend?

Well, “Total War” says, yes. Again, the 13600K, just edges past the 12900K. And the 13900K, just barely loses to the AMD 7950X. Frankly, essentially the most notable thing here is just how far behind the Ryzen 5 5600X is.

And it only falls further behind in “Far Cry 6,” where Intel gains their first big win, topping the chart with a 12% lead in average frame rates, but in addition big wins across the board in our minimums. The sport is just more stable on Intel.

And in “Hitman 3,” it just looks like we have been playing through the identical graphs over and yet again, trying to seek out alternative ways to kill AMD.

Factory constructing game “Factorio” meanwhile, guzzles L3 cache like a frat boy on spring break, allowing AMD to dominate.

The subsequent 4 games were tested at three resolutions, 1080p, 1440p, and 4k.

Let’s start with our old friend, “Tomb Raider.” At 1080p, the 5800X3D finally shows us what we all know it will possibly do. And while it’s totally much AMD’s game with their 7600X keeping a large gap over the 13600K, it is the 13900K that takes the cake.

Moving as much as 1440p, the rankings stay just about an identical. And at 4k, we hit a brick wall where the GPU is clearly bottlenecking, and all of the CPUs are performing inside error.

The thing about 4K benchmarks…

This is definitely something we have seen in all of our 4k games today, and truly most of our 1440p tests too. So in the event you were wondering why we do not test CPUs at resolutions higher than 1080p, it’s because results are inclined to be fuzzy at best and usually inconclusive. We could lower our graphic settings, but previously we have shown that that reduces strain on memory and consequently, the processor, which can sarcastically make the tests much more CPU certain.  Anyway, let’s get back to 1080p and stay there.

More Gaming benchmarks

In “Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands,” we see a good race with barely a ten% difference in frame rates between the 7950X and the last gen 12600K. Only the 5600X lags behind in any significant way.

And it’s nearly the identical story after we have a look at “Forza Horizon 5,” only narrow victories available there.

“Cyberpunk” though,  it’s kind of of a large number. Organizing our graph by average FPS puts the 13600K at the highest, but if you have a look at the minimums, it is the 13900K that’s the clear winner. In a number of of our charts, we see the 7600X outperforming the upper clocked, cached, and cored, 7900X, and we expect this is probably going as a result of some AM5 teething issues.

It seems that in some workloads, the chips with two CCDs could also be underperforming. Now this was noted by Hardware Unboxed and “Cyberpunk” is likely to be certainly one of those workloads, I suppose? Possibly AMD will fix it, but that’s in the long run and we would like performance now. So where do these results put us?

The gaming king is dead. Long live the gaming king! Or short lived depending in your perspective. Once we compare the common performance of all of our CPUs to the 7950X, we see the 13900K dominating with roughly 5% improved frame rates across the board. And the 13600K falls squarely within the nearly as good because the 12900K category alongside the Ryzen 9s. And it beats out its price competitor, the 7600X, due to more stable performance.

But have a look at this. What happened to everyone’s favorite Ryzen 7 5800X3D? It was so dominant in previous benchmarks that even Intel played coy of their performance graphs from their announcement. Well, now we have a few theories here. One, the games we used for this review didn’t profit as much from the additional V-Cache. It is a possibility.

The 4090 changes all the pieces!

Two, and that is the large one, like physically big, the RTX 4090. Once we compare these numbers against those from our Ryzen 7000 review, we see that the 7000 series have much improved frame rates however the 5800X3D, it doesn’t budge.

It seems that the additional GPU horsepower was what we wanted to reveal the 5800X3D’s upper limits. And the 5800X3Ds fall from grace continues in our productivity benchmarks.

Productivity Benchmarks

In Cinebench, the 13900K just cracks the 40,000 mark in multi-threaded with a healthy lead over AMD just across the board. The 13600K gets a variety of its extra efficiency cores showing up the competing mid-range CPUs by a large margin, and truly surpassing the 12700K despite the lower variety of performance cores. And in single threaded performance, the 13900K whips out nearly 2,300 points. That is 10% greater than the 7950X. Meanwhile, the 13600K just isn’t much faster than the 7600X so it’s leaning more on its E cores.

In y-Cruncher, which uses the fastest available algorithm for every chip, Intel actually takes an L by not supporting their very own AVX-512 extensions. But they manage a win within the Handbrake encode where the 13900K handily beats out the 7950X within the AV1 software encode. And the 13600K is not any slouch either, beating out its price competitor 7600X by 40%, and respiratory down the neck of the significantly costlier 7900X.

When compiling Chromium, the 7950X’s abundance of full fat cores continues to win in such heavily parallelized workloads.

So it’s strong showing in Blender, is again expected. But Intel is certain given them a run for his or her money.

V-Ray again remains to be very much AMD’s game, at the very least within the high end. The 13600K is making the 7600X look pretty irrelevant at this point.

In the one threaded FLAC encode, AMD’s really high clocks can only accomplish that much against Intel’s higher instructions per clock.

Moving on in SpecWorkstation, the 13900K steals the crown in every situation apart from finance. And while the 13600K cannot sustain with the 12900K in addition to did in gaming, it still offers lots more performance than the 7600X for just 20 extra dollars. It also beats the costlier 7700X.

While we didn’t test that CPU today, in comparison with the outcomes from our Ryzen 7000 review, we see that the 7700X loses in nearly every category.

At the top of the workday, Intel wins again. They beat AMD’s flagship. And while the victory is small, the difference in price is huge.

The 13900K undercuts the 7950X by $110, nearly 16%. And by providing 15% more performance at a mere $40 premium over the 7900X, that squashes that CPU’s performance at its current price point, taking the performance and the worth crown

What about RAM alternative?

You employ expensive RAM, that is not fair. I only have low cost DDR4. Will these CPUs be any good for me? To reply your rudely asked query, we ran some tests again on DDR4 and using low cost JEDEC speed DDR5. Expect a deep dive regarding RAM speeds in the long run. But for today, in the event you’re on DDR4, our comparably fast kit on the 13600K and SpecWorkstation, see’s performance remain virtually unchanged in most CPU workloads. There have been only a number of notable drops. And within the couple of gains we tested, we saw little to no difference.

Okay, well, what about slower DDR5?

Well, within the tests we ran on our 13900K, we saw typically performance drops of about 5% on the lower kit if we saw anything.

Thermals & Power

One thing I hope to see is that if Intel has managed to get their heat and power issues in check. In our F1 thermal tests, we see the 13900K running at about 10 degrees hotter than its last gen counterpart. But as AMD has shown us, if you will have thermal head room why not use it and pin the performance cores to full boost, right? And in Prime 95, the 250 watts CPU managed to spike as high as 350 watts. So you have to make certain that you simply get a beefy cooler. NH-D15 from Noctua is the minimum that I might recommend. The 13900K skyrockets to 100 degrees Celsius, before dialing back the clocks from their all core boost goal, and settling in at about 90 degrees.

As for the 13600K, well, it’s still managed well by the NH-D15, staying 10 degrees shy of throttling and keeping clocks pinned at max boost. It’s pulling 60 more watts and running 15 degrees hotter than its last gen counterpart though. But it is a worst case scenario.

Intel’s claims EXAMINED

So that they like power, but can they wield it responsibly? Intel claimed that when running the 13900K at 65 watts we could expect performance that’s on par with the 12900K at 241 watts. While the efficiency improvements they’ve made on this gen are impressive, plainly the daring claim with a lengthy post script, just isn’t quite true. 40% worse performance in Handbrake, and that is more of a double bogie than a par. But taking a look at SpecWorkstation, the improvements to efficiency are more in keeping with Intel’s claims.

Overall, Intel has managed to make some big improvements to their CPUs without increasing power budgets like AMD. Although in fairness, Intel’s power budget was already, and still is, sky high. They usually are doing higher numbers at a greater price. Remember the 13900K meets or beats the 7950X in just about all workloads for $110 less.

Now, I understand that a number of of you is likely to be feeling a bit sad along with your already aging Ryzen 5 5600X, but remember these three things. At 1080p in most games, performance differences shall be imperceptible because a variety of these games are already running faster than most monitors can refresh. And a variety of the performance differences in our charts are only exposed when the chips are run alongside a $1,600 GPU. As much because it feels bad, man, to see your three yr old CPU getting bodied by these latest chips, the yr over yr performance improvements that we’re seeing, due to this renewed competition, they feel pretty rattling good.