Hands-on test: 13th Gen Intel “Raptor Lake Core i9-13900K” CPU

Intel has released its new flagship desktop CPU, the Core i9-13900K. Does this new processor with 24 cores and 32 threads and a maximum boost clock of 5.80 GHz have the best prerequisites for productivity, creative and gaming applications? We take a look.

Unlike last year’s Alder Lake CPUs, not everything changes this year. Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs use the LGA1700 socket introduced with the 12th generation chips. The 13th Gen CPUs also work with Z600 series motherboards, although you may need to update the BIOS for the new CPU generation. Raptor Lake supports both DDR4 and DDR5. All in all, they’re pretty upgrade-friendly CPUs, especially if you’re thinking of going from, say, a 12th-gen i5 to a 13th-gen 19.

If you’re thinking about upgrading your components from an 11th Gen Intel CPU, things aren’t quite that simple. Aside from possibly your DDR4 memory, you’ll need a new motherboard and probably a new CPU cooler as well.

Like its predecessor, the Intel Core i9-13900K is an Intel 7 (10nm) microprocessor. It has 24 cores, divided into eight performance cores and 16 efficient cores. The performance cores run the important tasks, while the efficient cores are left for background and housekeeping tasks. The 13th generation CPU doubles the efficient core count of the last generation.

The performance cores of the Intel Core i9-13900K have a base frequency of 3.0 GHz with a maximum turbo frequency of 5.40 GHz, while the efficient cores have a base frequency of 2.2 GHz and a maximum turbo frequency of 4.3 GHz. The CPU’s maximum turbo frequency is advertised as 5.8 GHz per single core. On paper, these are relatively small gains over last year’s Core i9-12900K.

The unlocked CPU with the K suffix has integrated graphics powered by the same Intel UHD Graphics 770, slightly improved over the last generation. Technically, the main attractions are support for faster DDR5 memory up to 5600 MT/s with an increased memory bandwidth of 89.6 GB/s. The Z790 chipset motherboards, should you choose one, support more PCIe 4.0 lanes and an additional USB Type-C port.

In the absence of timely procurement of a DDR5 motherboard and the lack of components that take advantage of the capabilities of the Z790 chipset, I stuffed the sample Core i9-13900K that Intel put into my trusty MSI Z690 Carbon WIFI motherboard. Like most manufacturers, MSI recently released a BIOS update to prepare the motherboard for the new generation of Intel CPUs. If you’re thinking of doing the same, remember to update the motherboard with your 12th gen CPU still installed before swapping it out for the new CPU, otherwise it probably won’t work. While I’ll review a Z790 motherboard later, I don’t expect any noticeable performance gains between a Z690 motherboard and a new Z790 board.

I used my standard tests to assess the performance of the new Intel CPU. This is a mix of consumer and professional benchmarking applications: BAPCo’s Crossmark, UL’s Procyon, PCMark 10 and 3DMark, and Cinebench R23. I also dived into Intel’s own Extreme Tuning Utility to stress the chip and check for throttling.

The benchmark tests all showed an improvement over last year’s Intel Core i9-12900K, which is what you’d expect. However, the percentage increase depended very much on the application.

Crossmark saw an overall performance increase of 13% for the Intel Core i9-13900K over the Core i9-12900K. The gain for creativity was 17%, productivity 11% and responsiveness 8%.

Procyon, which uses Microsoft Office and Adobe applications for real-world testing, saw gains of 16% in office productivity, 19% in photo editing, and 6% in video editing. PC Mark 10 gave the Intel Core i9-13900K an 8% higher score than the Core i9-12900K, with 5% gains for essentials, 8% for productivity, and 11% for digital content creation.

Cinebench R23 tests the CPU’s 3D rendering capabilities by generating a photorealistic image across two tests, one with only one core and the other with multiple cores. In the single-core result, the Core i9-13900K was 16% faster than last year’s i9, and in the multi-core test, it was a whopping 49% faster.

The 3D Mark Time Spy Extreme benchmark is actually more of a GPU test than a CPU test, but it serves to illustrate the potential performance effect of a more powerful CPU when gaming. The 3DMark total score showed a 5% increase for the new CPU over its predecessor.

The GPU score used for both tests with the same RTX 3090 was unsurprisingly practically identical. However, the CPU score showed a performance increase of 41%.

It seems that the generally higher specification of the Intel Core i9-13900K achieves a performance increase of 5% to 10% over the 12th Gen i9, be it through higher clock speeds and optimizations. It also seems that the increased number of efficient cores in applications that make good use of multiple cores also resulted in a performance increase of up to 40-50%. This is also reflected in the 3D rendering results and creative application tests. And that makes sense since Intel has traditionally marketed the i9 for these types of applications.

You also can’t overlook the boosted performance that the Core i9-13900K brings to gaming. Of course it’s very game dependent, but even a 5% increase could get you an extra ten frames per second or more for CPU dependent games.

The Intel Extreme Tuning Utility is an application that allows users to easily overclock their unlocked CPUs like the Core i9-13900K (the “K” means it’s an unlocked CPU). The application also comes with a stress test and lots of CPU monitoring. It’s not the best software, but it’s free. I find it useful to see if there are thermal issues causing performance throttling.

The CPU cores warmed up to just over 90°C during a ten-minute run of the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility stress test. While the junction temperature, the maximum allowable temperature on the processor chip, is 100°C, I was surprised to see such temperatures at standard speeds. I also noticed thermal throttling during the stress test. Of course, this is a totally artificial test and not indicative of the CPU’s normal activities.

The test bench was cooled by a Corsair H150i Elite LCD all-in-one cooler, which features three 120mm fans. Switching the fans from “Balanced” to the louder “Extreme” settings brought stress test temperatures down to just under 90C and all but eliminated the thermal throttling issue. The downside is that these CPUs get hot, which can be a problem when overclocking without a very robust cooling solution.

I recently reviewed AMD’s flagship desktop CPU, the Ryzen 9 7950X. In my testing, the Intel Core i9-13900 performed roughly equally well overall, although perhaps slightly better than the AMD CPU. The difference between the two chips lies more in price and vendor loyalty (and perhaps Intel’s chips, which still support DDR4) than anything else.

The Intel Core i9-13900 is a powerhouse of a CPU. It raises the bar for Intel’s desktop CPU performance. It’s not a huge step up from 12th-gen chips, but the gains are significant, especially for multi-core applications like 3D rendering, image manipulation, and video editing. Gamers will also see an improvement, but from a value for money standpoint, you might be better off with an i5 or an i7.