Bet On Raptor Lake When The Chips Are Down

Intel’s Core i9-13900K And i5-13600K, Raptor Lake Revealed

After a small break, here are the Raptor Lake reviews from several sites, all of which found the same thing as Sebastian, the Core i9-13900K puts Intel back on top of the HEDT market.  These first two chips from the new family will be joined by others in the not too distant future, but for now these are what you get.  The chips both contain Raptor Cove P-Cores with hyperthreading for the heavy lifting and and single threaded Gracemont E-Cores for when efficiency is the best solution.  In their tests, The FPS Review used the same G.SKILL DDR5-6000 kit for all three of the CPUs they tested.

First off is the $589 Core i9-13900K has six P-Cores running at up to 5.8GHz as well as 12 E-Cores that can hit up to 4.3GHz.  The chips contain 36MB of L3 Intel Smart Cache and 32MB of L2 which closes one gap that AMD had created, not to mention offering 20 CPU PCIe lanes.  The power draw ranges from 125W up to a Max Turbo Power of 253W which is something you need to keep in mind when purchasing a PSU and cooler.

The $319 Core i5-13600K has six P-Cores that can run up to to 5.1GHz and eight E-Cores hitting 3.9GHz full out.  These chips caches are trimmed down a bit, 24MB of L3 Intel Smart Cache and 20MB of L2 Cache, as is the power draw which ranges from 125W up to 181W.   The two Raptor Lake chips can handle memory frequencies up to DDR5-5600 or DDR4-3200, depending on the motherboard you choose.

As for the performance, the Core i9-13900K generally outperforms the Ryzen 9 7950X and 7900X in gaming tests, often by a noticeably margin.  For general workloads Intel’s Raptor Lake also tends to win more benchmarks than it loses.  As for the lower cost i5-13600K stomps on the Ryzen 5 7600X in multithreaded workloads, though not so much in single threaded applications.  As for gaming, the i5-13600K and Ryzen 5 7600X offer very similar performance.  The only test where AMD ruled the roost was in power draw, with the Ryzen 9 7950X and i5-13600K pulling roughly the same power while the Core i9-13900K stands far above the crowd in it’s power requirements.

Check out more reviews below.