Clock Frequencies

The following chart shows how well the processor sustains its clock frequency and which boost clock speeds are achieved at various thread counts. This test uses a custom-coded application that mimics real-life performance—it is not a stress test like Prime95. Modern processors change their clocking behavior depending on the type of load, which is why we provide three plots with classic floating point math, SSE SIMD code, and modern AVX vector instructions. Each of the three test runs calculates the same result using the same algorithm, just with a different CPU instruction set.



The E-Core side of this chart (threads 17 to 24) can be somewhat misleading. It looks like the cores run at increasingly slower frequencies as the load goes up, but that's not the case. The frequency plotted is the average of all the P-Cores active, plus more and more E-Cores, which all run at a lower frequency than the P-Cores, which drags down the average.

That's why I tested E-Core frequency scaling separately in the chart below.



The E-Cores always run at 4.2 GHz, no matter how many of them are loaded.

Overclocking

Overclocking the Core i7-13700K is easy, thanks to its unlocked multiplier. While heat is not as big a problem as on the 13900K, I still feel like I was slightly limited by heat, even with liquid cooling. If you're trying to keep the CPU from overheating during OC, then it means you won't have much thermal headroom left to run the CPU at higher voltage, to unlock higher clock frequencies. I still got a very decent 5.5 GHz all-core OC out of the 13700K, at very reasonable voltage. On my sample, with a full-custom loop, I feel like 5.6 GHz could be in reach (with higher voltage). On air 5.4 GHz was no problem at all, 5.5 GHz wasn't possible, due to heat limiting the voltage I could use.