Intel Core i5-13600K

[AlwaysHope]

In two generations an i5 has more threads than an i7 from 2021 !

 

[jsven008]

Fermi all over again! Bulldozer too?
View attachment 266313

That picture. "Nvidia, the way its meant to be grilled."

Just when I thought CPUs couldn't get any hotter after the 7950x, now we have the 13900k! Its pushing 101C in application performance and 90C in gaming. I love performance, but this is performance at all costs. I'd wait for a lower-power CPU variant, like a 65 watt 13700 (without the 'k'). I like a cool and quiet PC.

In two generations an i5 has more threads than an i7 from 2021 !

Hey, don't be talking about my i7 like that. My i7 will always rule...in my mind!

 

[W1zzard]

What is the cause of 13600k performing terribly on 5.6ghz all core in Borderlands 3?

I've noticed it too, no idea

The one is virtualization, like @W1zzard said. Maybe cryptography too, both AES and SHA3, page 14.

AES and SHA3 seem fine

@W1zzard i was hoping DDR4 memory would also make the cut in these 13600K gaming charts/etc. Is this something expected soon?

No concrete plans, but I can do this in a week or two, once I've caught up with the backlog

Why do test results differ so much? Here Zen4 is above AlderLake.

Any chance he's using the integrated benchmark? The benchmark uses some kind of fast flyby on a tiny map, which isn't how actual gameplay works

 

[jsven008]

Thanks for the review.

I'd love to see a comparison of the R5 7600X and i5-13600K both limited to 65W (and in the case of the i5 e cores disabled) to get a fun preview of the non-X and non-K parts' performance and efficiency.

Yes, great review W1zzard! (as always). Hopefully we'll see some 65w comparisons in the future.

 

[LuxZg]

Of course. Some AMD acolyte tells us that Der8auer's analysis is useless.

Person should not name another one like this if they don't know them. Or trying to pick a fight. Otherwise, I'd think one wouldn't base their purchase on 2 1080p low details graphs, unsure why Wizz has a test suite of 70-80 (?) apps and games when all you need is 2 slides.

Analysis paralysis?

People buying K or X series chips are buying top of the line chips, they are labelled by both AMD and Intel as enthusiast chips. Honestly, there is nothing low end about a 13600K. Upper midrange really ends with the 13600 (or 12400).

I think you'd be right if looking across the entire spectrum, excluding these enthusiast chips - but lets keep in mind 70%-80% of consumer desktop PCs are OEM rigs.

The vast, vast majority of those are running something like a 12400 / 13400 - and most are running lesser than even that. Those chips have no problem whatsoever running on air.

The K and X chips are enthusiast chips. That's why I disdain too much talk of power consumption. It's the wrong context.

It's like watching a bunch of car enthusiasts talking about a Dodge Hellcat and being concerned about MPG. 90% of people who buy these chips don't give a crap.

I agree with this partially, but harsh truth is that:
A) AMD won't have anything below 7600X for a long while, so if one is building new PC from scratch and wants modern components you have nothing to buy but X enthusiast parts from them
B) while Intel will drop 13400/13600 sooner, the 13600 won't be actual Raptor Lake and difference between 13600 and 13600K is way more than just lower TDP. It's basically as deceiving naming as nVidia 4080, less of everything but "same" name.

Thus we're put between a rock and a hard place, either buying 200W CPUs that need tweaking to power limit or undervolt (or both), or buying something from previous gen, in which case we can just buy Zen3 on 2nd hand market and call it a day.

I just watched linustechtips review, they have a ddr4 ram gaming section. long story short, ram doesn't make a damn difference. even high end ddr5 ram vs low end really horrible ddr5 kits didn't matter in the few tests they did.

There's more to DDR4 than a few games. Some people work AND play on the same PC.

I will gladly wait a week or two for Wizz and others to post more DDR4 reviews. (But I think it will show that buying new PC with DDR4 is unwise)

Thanks for the review.

I'd love to see a comparison of the R5 7600X and i5-13600K both limited to 65W (and in the case of the i5 e cores disabled) to get a fun preview of the non-X and non-K parts' performance and efficiency.

I don't expect this to show non-K perf.
BUT! I would like to see 7600X, 7700X, and 13600K tweaked, undervolted, and power limited to roughly same power, and not just in games (that in realistic environment are GPU limited) but also in a productivity and other tests.

My view/rant:
I've been planning a new PC for this winter, but I can wait a bit more for all the reviews and tests. And perhaps a bit of price drop.

Yes, right now RL has price edge - if you go with DDR4 and B660 board. But why would I buy 13600K then, lose some here, lose some there, waste of money.

And if I compare DDR5 B660 it's <20$ diff to B650 board with more PCIe lanes. Unlocked 13600K would need bit larger cooler and bit better PSU than 7600X build, so total build price/perf would suffer. Or go with power limits, but then I want those power limited benches and graphs. For AMD we've already seen huge power saving without losing noticable performance (including non-gaming tasks). I want to see if RL can do the same and still beat 7600X with noticable difference (1-3% would be a tie).

IDK, we obviously need more data. Fight is very close. Depending on your focus you'd be picking very different builds for your money. I wish I was just playing games, I'd pick cheapest option and move on to GPU reviews. But this way we can be eyeing compromises between 13600K+DDR4 and 7600X+DDR5. Or ~70-75W power limited 7700X+DDR5 vs 13600X+DDR5. Both would be similar total build expenses. And then we'll get 13700K reviews... So many options.

IMHO, if you're not just gaming, wait a little before deciding what to buy for your needs, it's still very early days.

 

[AlwaysHope]

....

Hey, don't be talking about my i7 like that. My i7 will always rule...in my mind!

Same here, my i7 purchased barely a year ago will be in my gaming rig for quite a while yet. 8 good cores is all you need for gaming still.. thanks to current console gen.
Cypress cove cores with OC ringbus is just fine imo.

 

[gffermari]

13600K is the best overall cpu right now but….
I would sacrifice it by going for AM5 since the advantage that the platform will be supported for years cannot be ignored.

For AM4 owners, it’s pretty clear. 5800X3D or 5950X. And no one will miss this gen of cpus.

The other thing is that no one with a 12th gen intel needs to upgrade. It’s not worth it like going from gen to gen with AMD the last years.

 

[Valantar]

5800X3d beat it in one of them and lost to it in another, with the 13900K being the most efficient.

Uh ... no. I literally did the math in the post you quoted.
FC6:
13900K: 164fps/90W=1.8fps/W
5800X3D: 142fps/70,5W=2fps/W
2>1.8

PUBG:
13900K: 610fps/89.9W=6.8fps/W
5800X3D: 465fps/62.8W=7.4fps/W
7.4>6.8.
In other words, the 5800X3D is the most efficient in both.

I think it's fair to say that 99.99% of people actually shelling out money 13900K or 5800X3D are **NOT** buying the chips for their power efficiency. The more astute ones (like 2%) might look at dollars per FPS. The time it took me to type this is probably more valuable in terms of money earned if I were being paid than an entire year of +25W efficiency while gaming.

I don't disagree - but I also think that's a damn shame, especially given how performant these chips are and how their power usage is increasing generation over generation. The majority of people either not caring or not knowing enough to care isn't an argument for the thing they don't care about not being important. And, crucially, efficiency is a good gauge of an architecture - its job is to perform useful work, and the cost of doing so is power, so being more efficient is better as long as absolute performance is also sufficient. And a newer architecture being overall less efficient than an older one is this not all that good. Of course that also applies to the stock tuning of any Ryzen 7000, which are doing the exact same "let's hike up the power, fuck it" song and dance. That's why I'm more interested in the upcoming X3D chips, as they'll most likely be the first real improvement seen this generation - but at a price, obviously. For my part, I'm more than happy with my 5800X, and my interests are shifting more and more towards lower end hardware now that even nominally mid-range stuff like a 13600K is really overkill for even mainstream gaming. The 12100 was the most interesting CPU of the 12th gen (with the 12400 close behind), and I don't think that trajectory is changing any time soon.

A) AMD won't have anything below 7600X for a long while, so if one is building new PC from scratch and wants modern components you have nothing to buy but X enthusiast parts from them

I don't necessarily see this as being true this time around. Yes, they took friggin' ages to get sub-5600X chips out the door, but that was in the middle of record sales, a wafer shortage, a fab capacity crunch, and them trouncing the competition. Literally every variable in that is now changed - wafer supply is decent, fab capacity is essentially wide open as every chipmaker is cutting orders, and competition is fierce. AMD would have to be extremely dumb to not get a 5600, 5500(X?) and 5400 out the door ASAP - as well as X3D variants, of course. The market isn't there currently for selling boatloads of high end SKUs, so they need to get the lower end stuff onto store shelves as soon as possible.

 

[Bomby569]

like since the 10400, the 13400 will be the next cpu everyone should buy

 

[W1zzard]

like since the 10400, the 13400 will be the next cpu everyone should buy

As mentioned in the conclusion, everything below 13600K will be based on Alder Lake rebrand using the 8+6 die

 

[THU31]

As mentioned in the conclusion, everything below 13600K will be based on Alder Lake rebrand using the 8+6 die

If they do a 6P+4E CPU under $200, it will be amazing, even with the smaller caches.

And what if they did a 6C/12T i3? Seems hard to believe, especially with no low-end from AMD, but who knows. But the i3 will probably be 4P+4E.

 

[wolf]

my only regret is not being first to comment, where almost no matter what you say gets the most free internet points

 

[LuxZg]

I don't necessarily see this as being true this time around. Yes, they took friggin' ages to get sub-5600X chips out the door, but that was in the middle of record sales, a wafer shortage, a fab capacity crunch, and them trouncing the competition. Literally every variable in that is now changed - wafer supply is decent, fab capacity is essentially wide open as every chipmaker is cutting orders, and competition is fierce. AMD would have to be extremely dumb to not get a 5600, 5500(X?) and 5400 out the door ASAP - as well as X3D variants, of course. The market isn't there currently for selling boatloads of high end SKUs, so they need to get the lower end stuff onto store shelves as soon as possible.

What you say would be logical path. If there wasn't for AM4 and 5000 series still selling like crazy on low(er) end...

Btw did you actually mean 5600/5500/5400 or 7600/7500/7400? I assume 7xxx

 

[Valantar]

What you say would be logical path. If there wasn't for AM4 and 5000 series still selling like crazy on low(er) end...

True, but I don't think AMD sees AM5 as a threat to this - there's no way it will be as cheap, after all, with higher motherboard and RAM costs. And while selling more than one CPU per motherboard is obviously what they really want to do, they also really need buy-in for their new platform for this to happen in the future, they can't make all their bets on selling out an older platform - which will sell eventually anyway, as it's good and cheap.

Btw did you actually mean 5600/5500/5400 or 7600/7500/7400? I assume 7xxx

Lol, yes, I meant 7, not 5.

 

[benbird7]

They better get that that massive IPC jump with the 14th gen otherwise we'll have oven makers going out of business

Yes this also applies to AMD & zen5 ~

With those temps I think I'll just stick with the 12700k

 

[Chrispy_]

Boom!
There goes any reason for a gamer to buy a 7600X or 7700X.
I saw from other testing that DDR4 really isn't much of a hinderance to the 13600K, too - so you can avoid the AM5 and DDR5 premium for now.

 

[RandallFlagg]

With those temps I think I'll just stick with the 12700k

They need to stop using that air cooler for temp testing high end SKUs. That can dissipate around 180W.

So for every CPU that is going to draw more than 180W in their test, what they are doing is essentially maxing out the temp to see at what temp the CPU will thermal throttle. That's all those charts tell you.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

With those temps I think I'll just stick with the 12700k

Temps aside, why wouldn't you stick with the 12700K? The difference is no more than 5% in any test.

 

[RandallFlagg]

Boom!
There goes any reason for a gamer to buy a 7600X or 7700X.
I saw from other testing that DDR4 really isn't much of a hinderance to the 13600K, too - so you can avoid the AM5 and DDR5 premium for now.

When Zen 4 released, excepting the 7950X, all I saw was parity with Alder Lake but at a higher price.

I think a lot of folks intuitively knew this was coming. AMD needed to do a 2-gen type leapfrog of Intel, since AL was already demonstrably superior to Zen 3. They didn't do that, so naturally now they are clearly behind.

With AMD's 2 year release cycle, this is likely to just get worse. This time next year we'll have Meteor Lake, and AMD will still be on Zen 4. In 2024 Intel will release Arrow Lake, and that will be what Zen 5 goes up against.

I find it highly unlikely, that AMD would be competitive against an Intel part 2 generations in the future with Zen 5 using the same socket and so on, when they are effectively most of a generation behind right now. It's a total repeat of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

 

[Super Firm Tofu]

When Zen 4 released, excepting the 7950X, all I saw was parity with Alder Lake but at a higher price.

I think a lot of folks intuitively knew this was coming. AMD needed to do a 2-gen type leapfrog of Intel, since AL was already demonstrably superior to Zen 3. They didn't do that, so naturally now they are clearly behind.

With AMD's 2 year release cycle, this is likely to just get worse. This time next year we'll have Meteor Lake, and AMD will still be on Zen 4. In 2024 Intel will release Arrow Lake, and that will be what Zen 5 goes up against.

I find it highly unlikely, that AMD would be competitive against an Intel part 2 generations in the future with Zen 5 using the same socket and so on, when they are effectively most of a generation behind right now. It's a total repeat of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

As an Alder Lake and Zen 4 owner I can agree with this. The one caveat is that Intel makes their release dates - something they don't have the best track record with.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

When Zen 4 released, excepting the 7950X, all I saw was parity with Alder Lake but at a higher price.

I think a lot of folks intuitively knew this was coming. AMD needed to do a 2-gen type leapfrog of Intel, since AL was already demonstrably superior to Zen 3. They didn't do that, so naturally now they are clearly behind.

With AMD's 2 year release cycle, this is likely to just get worse. This time next year we'll have Meteor Lake, and AMD will still be on Zen 4. In 2024 Intel will release Arrow Lake, and that will be what Zen 5 goes up against.

I find it highly unlikely, that AMD would be competitive against an Intel part 2 generations in the future with Zen 5 using the same socket and so on, when they are effectively most of a generation behind right now. It's a total repeat of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Not exactly, IMO. Back then, AMD was slower, hotter, and more power-hungry, sometimes by appreciable margins. As of now, only the former is true, and not by very much. The deltas could easily grow/shrink/flip over the next couple of generations, but the above seems like a pretty cynical take.

 

[Valantar]

When Zen 4 released, excepting the 7950X, all I saw was parity with Alder Lake but at a higher price.

I think a lot of folks intuitively knew this was coming. AMD needed to do a 2-gen type leapfrog of Intel, since AL was already demonstrably superior to Zen 3. They didn't do that, so naturally now they are clearly behind.

With AMD's 2 year release cycle, this is likely to just get worse. This time next year we'll have Meteor Lake, and AMD will still be on Zen 4. In 2024 Intel will release Arrow Lake, and that will be what Zen 5 goes up against.

I find it highly unlikely, that AMD would be competitive against an Intel part 2 generations in the future with Zen 5 using the same socket and so on, when they are effectively most of a generation behind right now. It's a total repeat of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

You have some points here, but you're ignoring X3D and other future packing technologies, which will likely change AMD's progrssion here quite a bit. Zen4X3D will most likely beat Raptor Lake in gaming, and new packaging will allow for increased core counts/hybrid core layouts from AMD as well. The socket isn't a limitation for any lf this, so I don't see how it's relevant to this. AMD needs a wider big core sooner rather than later, but they also need CoWoS/LSI and to ditch the current through-substrate IF links - which we know they're working closely with TSMC on, and which RDNA3 serves as a test vehicle for. Just the latter will already improve inter-CCD latencies a lot, which will help performance. They'll also drop IF power a lot, allotting more power to the cores. None of that alleviates the need for a wider core to compete with ALD/RPL, but 3D cache kind of does. AMD is definitely on the defensive right now, and Meteor Lake will no doubt be good, but I don't see any reason to discount AMD quite yet.

 

[benbird7]

Temps aside, why wouldn't you stick with the 12700K? The difference is no more than 5% in any test.

Because I upgraded to the 4090 last week and I've got the upgrade bug.

I've hit a wall with 5ghz p cores and 4ghz e cores if I raise vcore anymore I start to red line on temps. I like to get my single core performance as high as I can for msfs. Got a MSI z690-a pro

 

[RandallFlagg]

Because I upgraded to the 4090 last week and I've got the upgrade bug.

I've hit a wall with 5ghz p cores and 4ghz e cores if I raise vcore anymore I start to red line on temps. I like to get my single core performance as high as I can for msfs. Got a MSI z690-a pro

Most of the 12700K have a reputation for not overclocking well, most people can't get past 5.1ghz. I got lucky on mine, with 5.3 / 5.2 / 5.1 / 5.0 every 2 cores, else I'd return it and get a 13600K.

I'm still tweaking, but this is stable 12700KF.

 

[Valantar]

Because I upgraded to the 4090 last week and I've got the upgrade bug.

I've hit a wall with 5ghz p cores and 4ghz e cores if I raise vcore anymore I start to red line on temps. I like to get my single core performance as high as I can for msfs. Got a MSI z690-a pro

MSFS seems like literally the only scenario where that upgrade would make any sense (a 17% uplift at 1080p according to Eurogamer, but crucially starting from pretty low fps to begin with), though I hope you can get a good price when selling your 12700K, as it's not exactly a cost-effective move.