Intel Core i9-13900K CPU mini-test
We’ll be releasing our full tests of the Intel Core i9-13900K (Raptor Lake) tomorrow. The sample arrived at the editorial office after the gallows deadline and it was not possible to make the full tests, but for now we have at least something that may get you in the right mood. One of the pleasant surprises is the higher single-threaded performance at lower power draw than AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs. And that’s even at a record 5.8 GHz.
The most powerful processor of the 13th Core generation has double the number of E cores (16) compared to the Core i9-12900K and has +600 MHz on the eight powerful “P” cores. In a single-threaded workload, a single core reaches a clock speed of 5.8 GHz, similar to the Ryzen 9 7950X. We haven’t tested this processor yet, but over the 100 MHz slower Ryzen 9 7900X, the Core i9-13900K processor usually wins by roughly 7 percent, and imagine that’s with about 8 percent lower power draw (by about 4.5 W). When encoding an audio recording, which is a single-threaded task, the Core i9-13900K draws 48.6 W and the Ryzen 9 7900X draws 53.0 W.
The Core i9-13900K is also currently topping the charts in the Speedometer 2.0 test summary, which measures performance in a web environment. While some subtasks employ more cores than one, these results still speak mostly to single-threaded performance.
We pulled measurements from Shadow of the Tomb Raider to preview gaming tests. The performance here is higher than the Core i9-12900K and again at slightly lower power draw, but there’s still poorer efficiency compared to the Ryzen 9 7900X.
The Core i9-13900K delivers comparable performance at 15 % higher power draw (132 vs. 115 W). Under gaming load, clock speeds hold at 5.5 GHz even with an average cooler. Faster by 600 MHz than they used to be (for the Ci9-12900K) are also the “efficient” cores.
Do not count on 5500 MHz in a multi-threaded workload (we will deal with this issue in more detail in the upcoming big test). Still, the performance is often very impressive. When encoding video with the AV1 encoder, it is 30 % faster than the price competitor Ryzen 9 7900X.
The more expensive Ryzen 9 7950X, with the same number of threads (32) as the Core i9-13900K, often doesn’t have it easy when it comes to price/performance ratio.
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
