Intel's 13th generation Core i9-13900K performance first exposure

With the opening of the second half of the year, major manufacturers are also fighting for their momentum, whether it is AMD, Intel, or NVIDIA's new generation of hardware has been preheated many times.

As Intel's 13th-generation Core Raptor Lake gets closer, various exposures continue, and even now some reviewers have sneaked away the performance test of the ES processor.

The UP master @EP Extreme Player Hall of Station B has now released "The First Exposure of the Whole Network! Intel 13th Generation Core i9-13900K Performance Test Part.1 Basic Performance" test, showing you the detailed test results of the i9-13900K sample, as well as power consumption.

It is worth mentioning that this processor is a qualified sample, and the performance is equivalent to the retail version. This i9-13900K uses a 24-core and 32-thread design, that is, 8 large cores + 16 small cores, and the power limit is set to 125W and 250W (MTB).

Judging by the CPU-Z data, this processor has the same main frequency as the one that appeared on Geekbench two days ago, with a base frequency of 3.0 GHz and a boost frequency of 5.5 GHz to 5.7 GHz (depending on the technology).

The processor was tested at 6400 MT/s on an Asus ROG Z690 Extreme motherboard with DDR5 memory, while the system also featured an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics card, 1500W power supply, and Thermalright AIO Frozen Magic 360 cooling.

Reviewers said the Intel 13900K was on average 10% faster than the 12900KF in single-core tests and about 35% faster in multithreaded workloads.

Of course, the real machine performance results currently depend on the type of test. Raptor Lake seems to be 46.34% faster than Alder Lake CPU in the CPU-Z multi-core test, but only 22% ahead in Geekbench 5 MT.

As we can see from the table below, Raptor Lake outperformed the 12th Gen Core in all but one memory test.

At present, the gap between the 12th-generation Core and the 13th-generation Core is mainly reflected in more small cores and high frequencies. The reviewers also pointed out that the performance improvement of Raptor Lake mainly comes from higher frequency (the 13th-generation Core can be achieves the same 5.5GHz as AMD Zen4 or even higher), while the two processors tested at the same frequency performed almost identically in the CPU-Z test, with a gap small enough to be considered an error:

Another problem is that this CPU needs a top-of-the-line cooler to get the most out of it. For example, @EP Extreme Player Tang Suier has used 360 water cooling, but it can still be seen that it directly reaches a high temperature of 100°C in Intel's own XTU tool and starts to trigger the temperature wall. In addition, according to previous reports, the power of this processor PL4 is as high as 420W, which means that the water cooling of ordinary people may not be enough.

Of course, Intel hasn't really confirmed a final release date for its 13th Gen Core lineup yet, but it's definitely this fall. According to rumors, it should be available around October, which is about three months from now, so stay tuned.