Intel Core i9-13900K finds its way in early testing

Almost a year ago, Intel introduced the Core 12000 “Alder Lake” family of hybrids, which in addition to new architectures made news in the form of DDR5 and PCI Express 5.0. Now it won’t be long before Team Blue’s next contribution to the fall battles is revealed, in the form of the Intel Core 13000 “Raptor Lake”. The launch is expected in October, but despite the short time remaining, not all reviewers can keep up.

On the Chinese social platform Bilibili (via video cardTesting of the next flagship Core i9-13900K has already appeared. So it is stated that this is not an engineering sample, but the final alternative to the consumer. Since users “ECSM_Official” and “One Raichu” have agreed not to reveal anything about their upcoming Z790-based motherboards, the published tests are now being done on motherboards with the Z690 chipset.

More specifically, it is the Asrock Z690 Taichi Razer version, accompanied by DDR5 memory at either 6000MHz and CL30, or DDR4 at 3600MHz and CL17. The packaging is cooled with the NZXT Kraken X73 AIO cooler. The clock frequencies of the newcomer Core i9-13900K are 5.8GHz at the highest on two performance cores, while the rest reach a turbo frequency of 5.5GHz. The energy-efficient ones at 4.3GHz are a bit lower, which is a big step up from the 3.7GHz that the corresponding Core i9-12900K cores land on.

The two generations of processors share some features with each other, including the “Gracemont” architecture of power-efficient cores, although the Core 13000 series has been improved in both one and two cycles. This can be seen, among other things, in Cinebench, where the energy-efficient “Raptor Lake” cores have a performance advantage of between 12 and 16 percent for single-threaded loads.

The improvement may be related to an increase in the amount of L2 cache, along with improvements to maintain a higher iteration over time. However, it should be noted that the test is run with an unlocked power budget, which gives a result that does not necessarily correspond to how most people use the processor in practice.

Multi-threaded performance provides significantly greater variations. In the three Cinebench versions we tested, the average performance is 48 percent higher, averaging just over 40 percent when testing the processor in 7Zip, 3DMark, and more. Here, increasing the clock frequency and doubling the energy-saving cores of the Core i9-13900K will likely play a larger role. Here, too, the unsecured energy budget seems to be applied, which is why it must be taken with a pinch of salt.

Together, however, they indicate that Raptor Lake is making a relatively large performance step, especially in terms of small changes Intel is making with the architecture. Just how big the difference in performance remains when more samples get a chance to sweat in the different test labs.