300W Intel Core i9-13900K CPU Review & Benchmarks: Power, Gaming, Production
video description
It shows that Intel hasn't gotten that much more efficient in the past, what 4 years, 5 years? Though 5.8 or whatever it achieves in the real world, given that it won't burst into flames is pretty damn sick.
Would love a frequency normalized test witch past abominations just like the 10980XE, to show how efficiency has changed over time.
Date: 2022-10-20
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Comments and reviews: 14
Todd
I don't like the power draw on Intel and Nvidia's last and current CPU/GPU and I am not happy with AMD's current power draw on their CPU... and there are rumors their graphics cards will not be any better. I gave up on all this and got a Ryzen 5600, G.Skill 2x8GB DDR4 3200, ASRock B550, and a Radeon RX 6650XT for 583 and this will likely last me for 5 years. So hopefully in the next 2 more generations they can fix this mess they are getting into. If I had gone an 7600XT, 2x8GB DDR5, 670 expensive board, and a RTX 3060Ti. I would have maybe 20% better performance with the CPU and slightly less performance with the GPU
I was actually surprised to see my old 460 drew slightly more power than my 1060 (with 6GB). I loved that 1060 and ran it for many years. My 460 was good too I was not too happy with my 950 and vowed to stay away from the X50 and stick with the X60s. The GTX 3060 was about the same as the 3060Ti at launch, but they released new drivers the boosted a lot of performance by a bit more. Seeing as I got the 6650XT for at least 100 less than the 3060 (non Ti) and it draws less power it was a not brainer. I only have one game that has ray tracing and that is Cyberpunk. Not sure how Starfield is going to be optimized as it is owned by MS and will be a huge XBOX title. With XBOX being AMD I am hoping it will be more optimized for AMD systems (CPUs and GPUs). Either way it is a good systems, cost about 500 less, draws 80-100w less, and generates less heat.
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I don't like the power draw on Intel and Nvidia's last and current CPU/GPU and I am not happy with AMD's current power draw on their CPU... and there are rumors their graphics cards will not be any better. I gave up on all this and got a Ryzen 5600, G.Skill 2x8GB DDR4 3200, ASRock B550, and a Radeon RX 6650XT for 583 and this will likely last me for 5 years. So hopefully in the next 2 more generations they can fix this mess they are getting into. If I had gone an 7600XT, 2x8GB DDR5, 670 expensive board, and a RTX 3060Ti. I would have maybe 20% better performance with the CPU and slightly less performance with the GPU
I was actually surprised to see my old 460 drew slightly more power than my 1060 (with 6GB). I loved that 1060 and ran it for many years. My 460 was good too I was not too happy with my 950 and vowed to stay away from the X50 and stick with the X60s. The GTX 3060 was about the same as the 3060Ti at launch, but they released new drivers the boosted a lot of performance by a bit more. Seeing as I got the 6650XT for at least 100 less than the 3060 (non Ti) and it draws less power it was a not brainer. I only have one game that has ray tracing and that is Cyberpunk. Not sure how Starfield is going to be optimized as it is owned by MS and will be a huge XBOX title. With XBOX being AMD I am hoping it will be more optimized for AMD systems (CPUs and GPUs). Either way it is a good systems, cost about 500 less, draws 80-100w less, and generates less heat.
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David
Just to chime in considering the discussions about power draw and heat, I did pick up a Ryzen 9 7900X, and use the Corsair H115i Pro that I had bought for the 3900X back in 2019. Outside of things like Cinebench runs since people ask for them, you will generally not see the CPU going to these sorts of max usage situations that drive the temperatures all the way up. I see 75C temperatures when playing games, not above that for the most part, though I saw an 82C temperature at one point. With the AIO, the fans and liquid temperatures are not going too high either. Total system power draw with monitor gets to maybe 500W with a Radeon 6800(non-XT) when playing games.
So, temperatures are warm, but seeing 5.175GHz-5.7GHz speeds without changing any BIOS settings outside of turning on EXPO support gets the job done. I've really not tried to tweak or tune my system, because I want the BIOS to become a bit more mature before I try to push things. About the only thing I plan to do is upgrade my NVMe SSD, and to upgrade my cooler to the Corsair H150i Pro or one of the variants, just for that extra cooling to see where the average desktop usage speeds like to hover when not pushing my system. 5.175GHz is what I am seeing across most cores when I look with HWInfo when I'm at the desktop doing stuff like web browsing or researching this or that. I'd expect better cooling to increase that to 5.3GHz or so.
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Just to chime in considering the discussions about power draw and heat, I did pick up a Ryzen 9 7900X, and use the Corsair H115i Pro that I had bought for the 3900X back in 2019. Outside of things like Cinebench runs since people ask for them, you will generally not see the CPU going to these sorts of max usage situations that drive the temperatures all the way up. I see 75C temperatures when playing games, not above that for the most part, though I saw an 82C temperature at one point. With the AIO, the fans and liquid temperatures are not going too high either. Total system power draw with monitor gets to maybe 500W with a Radeon 6800(non-XT) when playing games.
So, temperatures are warm, but seeing 5.175GHz-5.7GHz speeds without changing any BIOS settings outside of turning on EXPO support gets the job done. I've really not tried to tweak or tune my system, because I want the BIOS to become a bit more mature before I try to push things. About the only thing I plan to do is upgrade my NVMe SSD, and to upgrade my cooler to the Corsair H150i Pro or one of the variants, just for that extra cooling to see where the average desktop usage speeds like to hover when not pushing my system. 5.175GHz is what I am seeing across most cores when I look with HWInfo when I'm at the desktop doing stuff like web browsing or researching this or that. I'd expect better cooling to increase that to 5.3GHz or so.
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Matthias
I feel like those companies are completely out of touch, maybe reviewers should try put the some efficiency rankings ( i know its difficult since not everything they do is the same) in there or maybe to show people what this power consumption means how much it would cost per year for example to game on the CPUs if you run them for multiple hours a day and take that number in context. because maybe the 7950x is a worse ratio /frame with the price bought, but after a year what would that cost be and how would it have shifted? Or after 5 years(or the average lifetime of a CPU, I dont really know)? I feel like it would look completely different when 13900k consumes 300!!!!! Watts an Hour, i dont know about you guys, but I live in germany I got an apartment a few months ago and pay 0,48 cents per kWh, so its freaking expensive and Im gonna be looking into efficiency and power consumption in my next purchases. I hope i dont annoy you with a long comment like this and I hope someone gets to read it :)
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I feel like those companies are completely out of touch, maybe reviewers should try put the some efficiency rankings ( i know its difficult since not everything they do is the same) in there or maybe to show people what this power consumption means how much it would cost per year for example to game on the CPUs if you run them for multiple hours a day and take that number in context. because maybe the 7950x is a worse ratio /frame with the price bought, but after a year what would that cost be and how would it have shifted? Or after 5 years(or the average lifetime of a CPU, I dont really know)? I feel like it would look completely different when 13900k consumes 300!!!!! Watts an Hour, i dont know about you guys, but I live in germany I got an apartment a few months ago and pay 0,48 cents per kWh, so its freaking expensive and Im gonna be looking into efficiency and power consumption in my next purchases. I hope i dont annoy you with a long comment like this and I hope someone gets to read it :)
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Brian
Unpopular opinion: It s an interesting moment in computing, as the Wintel side of the aisle seems all-in on exponential increases in power consumption while the Apple side of the aisle is opting for efficiency. Curious to see how Apple s flagship Mac Pro will compare once it transitions to Apple Silicon. Given that performance-per-watt is where Apple has been most boast-worthy, I think it may be worth watching what rivalry might develop in the higher end space and how they position themselves against chips like this. While no one should have any delusion about a Mac GPU beating out an RTX 4090 any time soon, Apple may have an opportunity to show out on the CPU side if their silicon can scale up with a little more juice (but not so much as the Wintel side). Given that it s Apple, though, I m sure they ll hamstring themselves with an asinine design choice or artificial power limitation.
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Unpopular opinion: It s an interesting moment in computing, as the Wintel side of the aisle seems all-in on exponential increases in power consumption while the Apple side of the aisle is opting for efficiency. Curious to see how Apple s flagship Mac Pro will compare once it transitions to Apple Silicon. Given that performance-per-watt is where Apple has been most boast-worthy, I think it may be worth watching what rivalry might develop in the higher end space and how they position themselves against chips like this. While no one should have any delusion about a Mac GPU beating out an RTX 4090 any time soon, Apple may have an opportunity to show out on the CPU side if their silicon can scale up with a little more juice (but not so much as the Wintel side). Given that it s Apple, though, I m sure they ll hamstring themselves with an asinine design choice or artificial power limitation.
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John
There's one really SMART thing Intel did with this CPU and new MB, and that's move to DMI 4.0 X8 which is 16GB/s.
My main complaint with X670E isn't price because it's so feature rich of COURSE it's going to cost a lot of money, but instead it's the CPU-chipset link running PCIE gen4 X4. I find that pathetic. You have TONS of I/O on the MB and then you strangle it. It make X670 and X670E, to me totally worthless and that's sad to say. I HOPE AMD can put out a better MB with 2X the bandwidth on that link.
When the B650E MBs come out THEY'LL be worth it because they have less I/O and cost less because of it and that's CPU-chipset link won't be as pathetic with less I/O.
Hopefully AMD can grow a brain and fix this issue for 700 series MB and at LEAST make that link PCIe gen5 X4 to make it 16GB/s. THEN I'd actually buy into the platform.
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There's one really SMART thing Intel did with this CPU and new MB, and that's move to DMI 4.0 X8 which is 16GB/s.
My main complaint with X670E isn't price because it's so feature rich of COURSE it's going to cost a lot of money, but instead it's the CPU-chipset link running PCIE gen4 X4. I find that pathetic. You have TONS of I/O on the MB and then you strangle it. It make X670 and X670E, to me totally worthless and that's sad to say. I HOPE AMD can put out a better MB with 2X the bandwidth on that link.
When the B650E MBs come out THEY'LL be worth it because they have less I/O and cost less because of it and that's CPU-chipset link won't be as pathetic with less I/O.
Hopefully AMD can grow a brain and fix this issue for 700 series MB and at LEAST make that link PCIe gen5 X4 to make it 16GB/s. THEN I'd actually buy into the platform.
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orangeapples
While it may only make sense for now, I think it would have been good to see both DDR5 and DDR4 on the charts for these CPUs that can use both. I am honestly surprised you aren t. Those are realistic situations people will find themselves. It could be argued that if you are able to afford these high end CPUs there is no reason to get the cheaper DDR4, but that assumes general consumers were consistent. There will be people getting this CPU but then save some money by going DDR4 and not understand why their performance isn t what you suggest it should be.
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While it may only make sense for now, I think it would have been good to see both DDR5 and DDR4 on the charts for these CPUs that can use both. I am honestly surprised you aren t. Those are realistic situations people will find themselves. It could be argued that if you are able to afford these high end CPUs there is no reason to get the cheaper DDR4, but that assumes general consumers were consistent. There will be people getting this CPU but then save some money by going DDR4 and not understand why their performance isn t what you suggest it should be.
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Jim
Thanks for the great review. Seems like you need your own power plant for your pc now. I live in Germany, where power is getting more and more expensive. That's why my brain tells me (after your review), it would be better to buy a 7900x and run it in eco-mode, before buying an Intel. Maybe the 13600k could change my mind. I would like to see some tests which compare the performance of the new Intel and AMD CPUs in eco-mode. I know you guys are very busy right now, but I hope you find some time to do that. As always, thank you for your great work
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Thanks for the great review. Seems like you need your own power plant for your pc now. I live in Germany, where power is getting more and more expensive. That's why my brain tells me (after your review), it would be better to buy a 7900x and run it in eco-mode, before buying an Intel. Maybe the 13600k could change my mind. I would like to see some tests which compare the performance of the new Intel and AMD CPUs in eco-mode. I know you guys are very busy right now, but I hope you find some time to do that. As always, thank you for your great work
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SharkHealGaming
it would be interresting to see in the cpu coolers reviews the wattage dissipation max at differents fan speeds. For example you know that your cpu produces 200W at mid loads but your cooler can handle only 150W at 30% fan speed, so you have to set your curve to like 90% to handle 210W, otherwise the heat would accumulate and the cpu will go in thermal throttling. Considering also the noise, you will know if at the end you wll have a system that just work (but with 100% fan speed and a lot of noise) or a silent system.
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it would be interresting to see in the cpu coolers reviews the wattage dissipation max at differents fan speeds. For example you know that your cpu produces 200W at mid loads but your cooler can handle only 150W at 30% fan speed, so you have to set your curve to like 90% to handle 210W, otherwise the heat would accumulate and the cpu will go in thermal throttling. Considering also the noise, you will know if at the end you wll have a system that just work (but with 100% fan speed and a lot of noise) or a silent system.
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Jan
Hi GN, I would like more commentary on the temps and cooler choices of this cpu. and how the cooler affects the pricing.
I mean with the 12th gen an nh-d15 would probably still be enough to not thermal throttle if the case has many holes. but 300watts, I would like to know what the minimal cooling requirements are.
also the comparison with r9 7950x could be fun, because intel might be actually running cooler(with same cooler) because of the amd's thick ihs.
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Hi GN, I would like more commentary on the temps and cooler choices of this cpu. and how the cooler affects the pricing.
I mean with the 12th gen an nh-d15 would probably still be enough to not thermal throttle if the case has many holes. but 300watts, I would like to know what the minimal cooling requirements are.
also the comparison with r9 7950x could be fun, because intel might be actually running cooler(with same cooler) because of the amd's thick ihs.
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The
The insane power consumption on both platforms makes me really want to see some AMD ECO mode benchmarks. Given the way Zen 4 is thermally throttled and not power throttled, running in ECO mode supposedly makes stuff all difference to actual performance. I'd desperately love to see some proper benchmarking on this - maybe a proof of concept test on the 7700X, perhaps. It could be the genuine difference between the two platforms.
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The insane power consumption on both platforms makes me really want to see some AMD ECO mode benchmarks. Given the way Zen 4 is thermally throttled and not power throttled, running in ECO mode supposedly makes stuff all difference to actual performance. I'd desperately love to see some proper benchmarking on this - maybe a proof of concept test on the 7700X, perhaps. It could be the genuine difference between the two platforms.
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Eric
Der8auers take on power consumption and thermals came across decidedly more level-headed and interesting, I appreciate taking things at stock settings but there's at least something to be said for applying a custom power Target against performance on a CPU that is designed to be user adjustable rather than continuous loud explanations of how much power it draws. I love gamers Nexus but Der8auer did it better this time.
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Der8auers take on power consumption and thermals came across decidedly more level-headed and interesting, I appreciate taking things at stock settings but there's at least something to be said for applying a custom power Target against performance on a CPU that is designed to be user adjustable rather than continuous loud explanations of how much power it draws. I love gamers Nexus but Der8auer did it better this time.
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Bobaganoosh
So it's very much like Rocket Lake, but instead of expecting customers to do their own overclocking to get good performance, they just did the overclocking so that it performs well out of the box. I know the 11900k spooked Steve, but if you overclocked it (with adequate cooling of course), it was an absolute beast. Seems like the 13900k is the same kind of just throw more power at it approach.
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So it's very much like Rocket Lake, but instead of expecting customers to do their own overclocking to get good performance, they just did the overclocking so that it performs well out of the box. I know the 11900k spooked Steve, but if you overclocked it (with adequate cooling of course), it was an absolute beast. Seems like the 13900k is the same kind of just throw more power at it approach.
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Bobby
E CORE DISABLED please! These charts would be MUCH MORE valuable if you added 13900K with the E-cores disabled, comparing it to E+P and to other CPUs.
It's significant criterion for me. It matters a lot; if I want to sacrifice 5 fps on the average but have better lows, with E cores disabled, and still compare advantageously to 7950x, then it would definitely be useful info for me.
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E CORE DISABLED please! These charts would be MUCH MORE valuable if you added 13900K with the E-cores disabled, comparing it to E+P and to other CPUs.
It's significant criterion for me. It matters a lot; if I want to sacrifice 5 fps on the average but have better lows, with E cores disabled, and still compare advantageously to 7950x, then it would definitely be useful info for me.
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TheNerd
Intel Marketing: Ee need the fastest Gaming CPU!
Intel Engineer: Oh Sh.t AMD is gonna get us AGAIN. No Idea how to beat them with Innovations. MASTER CAUTION ALERT! We need MORE POWER!
Intel Marketing: Ah, let it draw the same amount of power as 2 5950X. It's okay. Who cares about millions of dead trees! We have THE FASTEST GAMING CPU!
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Intel Marketing: Ee need the fastest Gaming CPU!
Intel Engineer: Oh Sh.t AMD is gonna get us AGAIN. No Idea how to beat them with Innovations. MASTER CAUTION ALERT! We need MORE POWER!
Intel Marketing: Ah, let it draw the same amount of power as 2 5950X. It's okay. Who cares about millions of dead trees! We have THE FASTEST GAMING CPU!
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