Intel Core i9-13900K Review , latest model in 2023

Does it make sense to buy Intel's highly anticipated flagship processor Core i9-13900K? What are the Core i9-13900K features, what differences does it bring, and how does it perform against the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X? Here is the Core i9-13900K review with all the details, tests and comparison charts!

Things are heating up again on the processor side. While AMD is constantly gearing up, Intel wants to maintain and maintain its leadership in its field. Well, frankly, being AMD in this competition must be really painful sometimes.

Because the Red Team has unfortunately had to follow this race since it was founded in the late 1960s by employees who left Fairchild Semiconductor at that time. However, they did not attack well from time to time.

It has also managed to capture some of the CPU market, and the product lines we know and love today have expanded from there: Athlon , Bulldozer , and later Ryzen .

The recent launch of AMD's new ' Zen 4 ' CPUs looked like it could be a turning point for the microprocessor market. Both the Ryzen 9 7950X and the mainstream Ryzen 7 7700X were really satisfying with their performance.

But Intel is of course here again. The Intel Core i9-13900K is here and it has no intention of losing the throne to anyone.

Yep, Intel's 13th generation ' Raptor Lake ' CPUs arrived a while ago and we've been testing them for a while. It's not as big of a generational leap in performance compared to its predecessor, the Core i9-12900K , but it's enough to outshine AMD's best chips.

Basically what we will say is that the Core i9-13900K is at the top of our list of the most powerful processors. This CPU excels in everything from games to work platforms, delivering best-in-class performance for single and multi-core workloads.

You can see the Intel Core i9-13900K test results and comparison charts in our video just above.

Of course, when we're reviewing a new CPU, we run a lot of tests: Games, synthetic benchmarks, render tests, power and thermal monitoring, and more. But we won't show you all the charts full of test results, but we can say this. In all but 6 of the 24 average test results we did, the Core i9-13900K manages to outperform the Ryzen 9 7950X .

The 13900K outperformed its predecessor by an average of 25 percent in all our tests, which is an incredible leap that Intel has made in just 1 year, considering the price hasn't changed compared to its predecessor . More importantly, it is a big move that it has caught AMD in this area. When you look at the price, they are almost the same price as the Ryzen 9 7950X. In this sense, we can say that this processor is one of the best consumer desktop processors ever produced. If you are thinking of collecting a good desktop computer, you can easily put the 13900K at the top of your list.

Another point in Intel's favor is that unlike the new Ryzen chip, the 13900K—and all of Intel's 13th-gen desktop CPUs—do not need any other new components—at least if you're upgrading from a 12th-gen chip. This processor uses Intel's 12th generation CPU socket LGA-1700 . This means that if you are upgrading a computer with this processor, you will need a new motherboard.

The other good thing is that you don't necessarily have to buy new memory. You can use LGA-1700 motherboards with DDR4 or DDR5 RAM slots; The i9-13900K supports both memory types, which makes things easy as the new DDR5 kits are still quite expensive. However, you may need a new cooler as there is no stock cooler that comes with the 13900K. Therefore , you will need a cooler compatible with the LGA-1700 socket .

Now let's get to the technical side. Intel's 12th generation ' Alder Lake ' processors were manufactured using the same 10nm process as the i9-13900K and brought with them a whole new set of features, most notably the new 'big.LITTLE' microarchitecture . This architecture split the cores on the CPU die into performance and efficiency cores, a design choice previously seen in ARM chips.

If you're not familiar with big.LITTLE, the main implication is that performance-oriented cores take over most of the work given to the processor, while less powerful efficiency cores take care of background tasks to reduce overall power consumption.

In Intel's architecture, performance-only cores use hyperthreading technology, which doubles the number of CPU threads available per core . In other words, with 8 performance (P) cores and 16 efficiency (E) cores, the i9-13900K is a 24-core processor in total , while also hosting 32 threads. For comparison, the previous generation 12900K had 8 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores, giving it 24 threads. When we look at the rival Ryzen 9 7950X, we see that it has 16 normal cores and contains 32 threads.

From a practical point of view, adding more efficiency cores means 2 things: Firstly, 13900K is slower clocked and needs less power on average for daily use than its predecessor, but clock frequency and power draw are higher than 12900K at maximum CPU load. Second, and more importantly, multi-core performance has definitely skyrocketed. We will see this already in the test results.

In terms of other features, the 13900K almost exactly matches the 12th generation. It's unlocked for overclocking - which is what the 'K' in the name indicates. As we just mentioned, it supports PCIe 5.0 along with both DDR4 and DDR5 memory. It can also take advantage of all the nifty features Intel has built into previous generation Core processors, from Intel Turbo Boost to the AVX2 instruction set.

It even has the same integrated graphics, the Intel UHD Graphics 770 , but don't expect too much from it, of course, in terms of gaming performance. It can run standard PC work at resolutions up to 8K, but you won't be using it for gaming or any demanding graphics software. On the other hand, if you have the budget to buy this processor, we think that you can already buy a good graphics card with it.

Yes, if we're done this far, let's get started with the test charts now. We evaluated the 13900K in many tests. From PC Mark to creative apps, gaming performance, we've been pretty tired in many tests. Apart from a few tests, we can say that the Ryzen 9 7950X did not open up. The single-core performance of the processor is high, but the multi-core performance is of course much higher and does its job well. Now let's share the results of these tests with you.

You can see the Intel Core i9-13900K test results and comparison charts in our video just above.

Conclusion

Yes, the test results are like that. All in all, it's not hard to say that the Intel Core i9-13900K is a beast that does not open its eyes to AMD in everything from games to synthetic benchmarks. It's also clear that it offers much better value for money. Currently, you can find the Intel Core i9-13900K on the market for around 13 thousand TL , which makes it a more logical choice than the Ryzen 9 7950X, not only in terms of transaction volume, but also in terms of price / performance with this price tag. If you put an RTX 4090 next to it, you may have met your PC needs for many years.