Intel Takes the Throne: i5-13600K CPU Review & Benchmarks vs. AMD Ryzen
video description
Also i don't know about the US, but for example in Poland the 7600X is actually around 50 cheaper than the i5-13600k.
The main difference comes basically from nonexistent cheap but decent boards for AM5 yet. Also i would definitely not go for DDR4, when DDR5 already is so cheap and the cheapest DDR5 2x16GB kits are around as fast or sometimes faster than DDR4 3200/CL14.
Edit: from what I see on Amazon, the difference is even bigger in the US. The 13600k is 382, 7600x is 299. At this point it's the difference between the price of motherboard.
Although it's hard to argue against 13600k being overall better cpu, aside from shit efficiency of course.
Date: 2022-10-21
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Comments and reviews: 14
kathrynck
I kinda like the 13700k and the 7900X personally. (mixed use)
Building a new system near the end of this year. I'm not gonna hinder future compatibility with cheaper old mobo's. If I had a mobo I planned to recycle, that'd be different. But I don't. For me, mobo/ram prices are more or less the same between intel & AMD, as I'm not going to spend into a new mobo & ram which will very shortly be 'last gen'. It's more money now, but it's more years until I need to build a new system, which is effectively money saved later.
13700k is 150 less than 7900X ( 399 vs 549 at microcenter), and that's a lot. On the other hand, intel is still being pretty tight with pcie lanes. I like that the 7900X has 24, which would provide 16 for the graphics card, and still have 2x4 for two very fast nvme's. But intel looks like it would save a few bucks on power. Although from what I have seen, 7900X can go 'faster' with the power turned down just a bit (thermal ceiling), and runs significantly cooler than stock that way. Seems they are slightly over-juiced out of the box. Easy to get it down to more like a 150 watt cpu, which actually benches better (by avoiding thermal max to hold onto high boost much longer), by just spending 20 minutes in bios.
I'm slightly concerned about some screwball or older software picking the wrong cores using intel's P/E core mix. Perhaps someone who is strong with the code can tell me if that's completely a non-issue, or just 'unlikely', etc.
Both xbox and ps5 have 8core/16thread, so I think we'll start to see more and more games which 'efficiently' utilize up to 8c/16t. The 13700k has 8 performance cores, so it should make a 'very' strong showing in any software optimized for the consoles, with obviously much higher max clock speeds. But say 4 years from now? I dunno if 12 full power cores, or 8 good cores and 8 weaker cores would perform better. From your benching, it looks like the two would be roughly a wash in non-gaming workloads.
At this moment, I kinda lean 13700K. But if AMD drops that price slightly, that extra 4 pcie lanes will become pretty tempting. I'm kinda sensitive to pcie lane count. Intel seems to use it as a gateway feature to justify their higher end cpu's. I've had to upgrade a perfectly good computer purely just for more pcie lanes before, and I don't want to repeat that. Also, AM5 boards support pcie 5 to all lanes, not just the graphics card lanes.
GPU would be 4090 or RDNA3. I'm waiting to see what RDNA3 will offer. Basically it'll be chosen as the cheapest gpu which can bury the needle on 120 fps on raster in 4k with settings turned up. Not into DLSS3, and I don't think ray tracing is for me yet. It's pretty, but even on a 4090, I think I'd rather have the frames. 4080 16 is, just shy of that goal, and has bad price/performance. If AMD offers a card at 4080 'Ti' ish performance, at a price more like 995, i'll get that. If not, I may have to ante up for a 4090.
Thoughts?
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I kinda like the 13700k and the 7900X personally. (mixed use)
Building a new system near the end of this year. I'm not gonna hinder future compatibility with cheaper old mobo's. If I had a mobo I planned to recycle, that'd be different. But I don't. For me, mobo/ram prices are more or less the same between intel & AMD, as I'm not going to spend into a new mobo & ram which will very shortly be 'last gen'. It's more money now, but it's more years until I need to build a new system, which is effectively money saved later.
13700k is 150 less than 7900X ( 399 vs 549 at microcenter), and that's a lot. On the other hand, intel is still being pretty tight with pcie lanes. I like that the 7900X has 24, which would provide 16 for the graphics card, and still have 2x4 for two very fast nvme's. But intel looks like it would save a few bucks on power. Although from what I have seen, 7900X can go 'faster' with the power turned down just a bit (thermal ceiling), and runs significantly cooler than stock that way. Seems they are slightly over-juiced out of the box. Easy to get it down to more like a 150 watt cpu, which actually benches better (by avoiding thermal max to hold onto high boost much longer), by just spending 20 minutes in bios.
I'm slightly concerned about some screwball or older software picking the wrong cores using intel's P/E core mix. Perhaps someone who is strong with the code can tell me if that's completely a non-issue, or just 'unlikely', etc.
Both xbox and ps5 have 8core/16thread, so I think we'll start to see more and more games which 'efficiently' utilize up to 8c/16t. The 13700k has 8 performance cores, so it should make a 'very' strong showing in any software optimized for the consoles, with obviously much higher max clock speeds. But say 4 years from now? I dunno if 12 full power cores, or 8 good cores and 8 weaker cores would perform better. From your benching, it looks like the two would be roughly a wash in non-gaming workloads.
At this moment, I kinda lean 13700K. But if AMD drops that price slightly, that extra 4 pcie lanes will become pretty tempting. I'm kinda sensitive to pcie lane count. Intel seems to use it as a gateway feature to justify their higher end cpu's. I've had to upgrade a perfectly good computer purely just for more pcie lanes before, and I don't want to repeat that. Also, AM5 boards support pcie 5 to all lanes, not just the graphics card lanes.
GPU would be 4090 or RDNA3. I'm waiting to see what RDNA3 will offer. Basically it'll be chosen as the cheapest gpu which can bury the needle on 120 fps on raster in 4k with settings turned up. Not into DLSS3, and I don't think ray tracing is for me yet. It's pretty, but even on a 4090, I think I'd rather have the frames. 4080 16 is, just shy of that goal, and has bad price/performance. If AMD offers a card at 4080 'Ti' ish performance, at a price more like 995, i'll get that. If not, I may have to ante up for a 4090.
Thoughts?
reply
Milan
Yes, there is that FX 9590 included , is it of the ancient Bulldozer the Moah' Cores if the memory serves me? I remember how AMD got demolished by Intel's Skylake back in the day...Intel created a powerful echo back then, taking a decisive lead and shaping the CPU market for almost the whole next decade which had a detrimental yet numbing effect on the development of accessible advanced CPU nodes and the overall speed of progress not only within the PC industry but beyond.
Indeed, the steadily increasing speed of development of all the architectural and other standards like DDR4, PCIe 3.0 or solid-state storage drive felt amazing....even more so coupled with the dawning of the AI, the first usable neural networks and all further software advances and novelties in programming languages and amazing feats with low-level API empowering insanely faster parallel computation and execution and bringing it to the average Joe's desktop application - few would argue we were about to get hardstuck so much so we wouldn't see our dreams and prospects of affordable fast ECC-for-everyone DDR5 memory or the new interconnect and architecture standards widely supported on the brand new Windows 10 enabling crazy fast accelerated IO with various PCIe 4.0 addin cards and devices.
We expected all of it in the subsequent years 2012 trough 2015, 2018, 2020. changing the ways we interact with machines at the level not witnessed since the introduction of the computer mouse.
However, things happened to seemingly slow down to a halt.
But no.
We had a lot to learn and research before rushing further and pushing out standards and tech that would otherwise have its full potential go to waste - without us having developed the firm base for exploiting it.
Anyway, we'll keep on watching, I guess hindsight's 20/20...and a fool is blind!
reply
Yes, there is that FX 9590 included , is it of the ancient Bulldozer the Moah' Cores if the memory serves me? I remember how AMD got demolished by Intel's Skylake back in the day...Intel created a powerful echo back then, taking a decisive lead and shaping the CPU market for almost the whole next decade which had a detrimental yet numbing effect on the development of accessible advanced CPU nodes and the overall speed of progress not only within the PC industry but beyond.
Indeed, the steadily increasing speed of development of all the architectural and other standards like DDR4, PCIe 3.0 or solid-state storage drive felt amazing....even more so coupled with the dawning of the AI, the first usable neural networks and all further software advances and novelties in programming languages and amazing feats with low-level API empowering insanely faster parallel computation and execution and bringing it to the average Joe's desktop application - few would argue we were about to get hardstuck so much so we wouldn't see our dreams and prospects of affordable fast ECC-for-everyone DDR5 memory or the new interconnect and architecture standards widely supported on the brand new Windows 10 enabling crazy fast accelerated IO with various PCIe 4.0 addin cards and devices.
We expected all of it in the subsequent years 2012 trough 2015, 2018, 2020. changing the ways we interact with machines at the level not witnessed since the introduction of the computer mouse.
However, things happened to seemingly slow down to a halt.
But no.
We had a lot to learn and research before rushing further and pushing out standards and tech that would otherwise have its full potential go to waste - without us having developed the firm base for exploiting it.
Anyway, we'll keep on watching, I guess hindsight's 20/20...and a fool is blind!
reply
Spagneto
I'm honestly so impressed with Intel's engineers. Intel has for a while fallen behind on their production technique, thus they are still stuck on 10nm while AMD (through TSMC) has now reached 5nm. Squared it means AMD should be able to fit 4 transistors on the same space as Intel can fit 1. Even with that disadvantage, Intel is outperforming AMD on both speed, power consumption, and price for the consumer. On top of that, Intel is fully vertically integrated meaning they have a huge profit margin while AMD can literally not profit at TSMCs current prices.
At the same time Intel are planning a huge jump to 2nm with 15th gen (2 years away). And they will be able to compete with Nvidia GPUs by that time as well. I have a hard time believing they will ever lose to the competition when they have put on such a show even throughout steep competition from TSMC.
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I'm honestly so impressed with Intel's engineers. Intel has for a while fallen behind on their production technique, thus they are still stuck on 10nm while AMD (through TSMC) has now reached 5nm. Squared it means AMD should be able to fit 4 transistors on the same space as Intel can fit 1. Even with that disadvantage, Intel is outperforming AMD on both speed, power consumption, and price for the consumer. On top of that, Intel is fully vertically integrated meaning they have a huge profit margin while AMD can literally not profit at TSMCs current prices.
At the same time Intel are planning a huge jump to 2nm with 15th gen (2 years away). And they will be able to compete with Nvidia GPUs by that time as well. I have a hard time believing they will ever lose to the competition when they have put on such a show even throughout steep competition from TSMC.
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ImCloud
after watching this i noticed that my purchase of my 3900x back 2-3 years or so ago prolly wasn't the smartest move for part time streaming and mostly gaming fps games, but also seeing this i feel like i wont have to upgrade unless something breaks for the next 2-5 years depending on what kind of frames i wanna get
i think if i switch out my rtx 2060 (i know this is a bad fit for my cpu lol)
for one of the new amd cards soon it prolly will be a bit faster again with sam enabled, no clue tho. Thanks for the video used to be hardcore intel fan, then i switched to ryzen and really thought badly about intel the whole time but seeing this i really should hate either of these. I still dont really like the whole 190 watts thing even tho the i5 is better efficient, i5s used to be like 65 or smth like that i miss those days
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after watching this i noticed that my purchase of my 3900x back 2-3 years or so ago prolly wasn't the smartest move for part time streaming and mostly gaming fps games, but also seeing this i feel like i wont have to upgrade unless something breaks for the next 2-5 years depending on what kind of frames i wanna get
i think if i switch out my rtx 2060 (i know this is a bad fit for my cpu lol)
for one of the new amd cards soon it prolly will be a bit faster again with sam enabled, no clue tho. Thanks for the video used to be hardcore intel fan, then i switched to ryzen and really thought badly about intel the whole time but seeing this i really should hate either of these. I still dont really like the whole 190 watts thing even tho the i5 is better efficient, i5s used to be like 65 or smth like that i miss those days
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Nkt
New lightning : excellent !
I really expected AMD to smash intel in efficiency. I am pleasantly surprised intel can hold its ground with Zen4 non X3D CPUs. The plateform costs are truely in favor for Intel for the few next month until AMD get its X3D Zen 4 CPUs out. Although they will probably be expensive AF.
I have said multiple times recently that I would go AMD but honestly DDR5 is so expensive with almost no benefit to gaming, I'll probably go Intel route for this generation, performance/ is way better (sounds strange to say that for once). My small 11400f is tired and wasn't expecting to be used for VR when I bought it, he'll be better used in someone else rig. Time to go up a tier for me. The extra cores will be useful with the little production I do.
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New lightning : excellent !
I really expected AMD to smash intel in efficiency. I am pleasantly surprised intel can hold its ground with Zen4 non X3D CPUs. The plateform costs are truely in favor for Intel for the few next month until AMD get its X3D Zen 4 CPUs out. Although they will probably be expensive AF.
I have said multiple times recently that I would go AMD but honestly DDR5 is so expensive with almost no benefit to gaming, I'll probably go Intel route for this generation, performance/ is way better (sounds strange to say that for once). My small 11400f is tired and wasn't expecting to be used for VR when I bought it, he'll be better used in someone else rig. Time to go up a tier for me. The extra cores will be useful with the little production I do.
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MISTER
Great work GN as always, the thorough testing is impressive! As someone who sits on a now older Intel system (9700K) I do wonder how these older chips stack up to newer counterparts and how much value is actually gained from potential upgrades - not just raw performance but also potentially performance/watt.
I saw Derbauer doing some very interesting testings with power limiting the 13900K and reaching truly impressive efficiency results for the performance it could deliver, reaching close to 90% of its peak performance while at a wattage level low enough to still be aircooled just fine. THAT is impressive. But I'd also love to see more independent testers verify these results and show their own findings.
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Great work GN as always, the thorough testing is impressive! As someone who sits on a now older Intel system (9700K) I do wonder how these older chips stack up to newer counterparts and how much value is actually gained from potential upgrades - not just raw performance but also potentially performance/watt.
I saw Derbauer doing some very interesting testings with power limiting the 13900K and reaching truly impressive efficiency results for the performance it could deliver, reaching close to 90% of its peak performance while at a wattage level low enough to still be aircooled just fine. THAT is impressive. But I'd also love to see more independent testers verify these results and show their own findings.
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Schmich
A shame for AMD not to do a hybrid DDR4-DDR5 like Intel here, or like they did with Phenom II back in the day. It saved me so much money when I could keep DDR2 when DDR3 was new. I could even keep the motherboard with a BIOS flash.
Looking at both AMD and Intel side by side makes me remember what Der8auer said about the heatspreader. How it's massive on AMD, and therefore inefficient, and probably there to have somewhat of a cooler backwards compatibility with AM4 which is insane. Do DDR4 backwards compatibility instead! Not a AM5 platform that has too big of a heatspreader for the next 7 years :/
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A shame for AMD not to do a hybrid DDR4-DDR5 like Intel here, or like they did with Phenom II back in the day. It saved me so much money when I could keep DDR2 when DDR3 was new. I could even keep the motherboard with a BIOS flash.
Looking at both AMD and Intel side by side makes me remember what Der8auer said about the heatspreader. How it's massive on AMD, and therefore inefficient, and probably there to have somewhat of a cooler backwards compatibility with AM4 which is insane. Do DDR4 backwards compatibility instead! Not a AM5 platform that has too big of a heatspreader for the next 7 years :/
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Catriona
I do welcome an open competition between AMD and Intel, but it#s seems to turn into a massive battle of Attrition consuming power and generating heat like there is no tomorrow. An i5 sucking 160 Watt is not an achievement in my eyes.
And it's even more ridiculous with graphics cards. I feel like the PC Master race between those Corporations will make PCs more and more ridiculous until - on day it all crashes and RISC computers take over. A bit like the American car industry in the 1970's.
It's ludicrous gigantism. Any efficiency gains are completely buried by the performance race.
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I do welcome an open competition between AMD and Intel, but it#s seems to turn into a massive battle of Attrition consuming power and generating heat like there is no tomorrow. An i5 sucking 160 Watt is not an achievement in my eyes.
And it's even more ridiculous with graphics cards. I feel like the PC Master race between those Corporations will make PCs more and more ridiculous until - on day it all crashes and RISC computers take over. A bit like the American car industry in the 1970's.
It's ludicrous gigantism. Any efficiency gains are completely buried by the performance race.
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Emilyshabang
It's interesting that Gamers Nexus, Jay, LTT, etc don't mention that while 13th gen is a cheaper platform this go around, but leave out that the socket is dead after this CPU. I'm not tied to either Intel or AMD...just thought it was interesting that most reviewers brought that up when AMD launched the 5000 cpus but left that out in the reviews of 13th gen. I'm likely not a buyer for either this round....if anything I might upgrade my 5800x to the 5800x3d and possibly a 7000 GPU if they are a significant jump over my 6900XT (tho I'd likely just stick with my current gpu)
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It's interesting that Gamers Nexus, Jay, LTT, etc don't mention that while 13th gen is a cheaper platform this go around, but leave out that the socket is dead after this CPU. I'm not tied to either Intel or AMD...just thought it was interesting that most reviewers brought that up when AMD launched the 5000 cpus but left that out in the reviews of 13th gen. I'm likely not a buyer for either this round....if anything I might upgrade my 5800x to the 5800x3d and possibly a 7000 GPU if they are a significant jump over my 6900XT (tho I'd likely just stick with my current gpu)
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Edsel
At 500-600fps Steve is right you won't notice a difference if you're a casual player. If you're a sweaty future pro the high fps is necessary to eliminate any bottleneck to where all that's left in the equation is the ping to the server (unless you're at a LAN where it's the same for everyone) you're reaction time assuming you're using the best peripherals for whatever game you sweat at.
I'm wondering if there's a way to click latency to see who really has the lowest for the best possible outcome for when you take a shot and it lands on screen.
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At 500-600fps Steve is right you won't notice a difference if you're a casual player. If you're a sweaty future pro the high fps is necessary to eliminate any bottleneck to where all that's left in the equation is the ping to the server (unless you're at a LAN where it's the same for everyone) you're reaction time assuming you're using the best peripherals for whatever game you sweat at.
I'm wondering if there's a way to click latency to see who really has the lowest for the best possible outcome for when you take a shot and it lands on screen.
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Bryan's
Hey Steve, I know this is way off topic, but, I just got a survey email from NewEgg thanking me for purchasing a new gaming PC. The survey had multiple choice questions in a format that made it clear that the survey was about a new gaming PC I had purchased. It was confusing because I've never purchased a gaming PC from Newegg. The only purchase I've made from Neweggwas a Crucial 2TB nvme drive. Is this some shady marketing scheme by Newegg or something nefarious. It looked legitimate just confusing as all heck.
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Hey Steve, I know this is way off topic, but, I just got a survey email from NewEgg thanking me for purchasing a new gaming PC. The survey had multiple choice questions in a format that made it clear that the survey was about a new gaming PC I had purchased. It was confusing because I've never purchased a gaming PC from Newegg. The only purchase I've made from Neweggwas a Crucial 2TB nvme drive. Is this some shady marketing scheme by Newegg or something nefarious. It looked legitimate just confusing as all heck.
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D vid
With all the new tech releasing this year I'm just in awe of how unnesecerly powerful they are. Back in the day when a new chip released you were happy to buy it because it meant GameX you could play at 60 fps instead of 30 or at that magical FULLHD instead of regular HD but nowadays the games requirements are not realy going up and up year to year so getting 565 FPS instead of that lowly and disqusting 432 of previous gens just means nothing, leaving me with the fealing that all of these new chips are meaningless.
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With all the new tech releasing this year I'm just in awe of how unnesecerly powerful they are. Back in the day when a new chip released you were happy to buy it because it meant GameX you could play at 60 fps instead of 30 or at that magical FULLHD instead of regular HD but nowadays the games requirements are not realy going up and up year to year so getting 565 FPS instead of that lowly and disqusting 432 of previous gens just means nothing, leaving me with the fealing that all of these new chips are meaningless.
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Rados aw
If your goal is frame time consistency, it's good to cap your FPS at 85-90% of max you can get. Usually it's giving you some headroom, both in thermal and power, so when those harder frames start, gpu have some space for them go. How much it helps on the high end I don't know, but in my low-end example going from 70 to capped 60 brought lows from middle 20s to middle 30. Obviously it's not always like that, but I recommend it as it seems consistent throughout titles I used.
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If your goal is frame time consistency, it's good to cap your FPS at 85-90% of max you can get. Usually it's giving you some headroom, both in thermal and power, so when those harder frames start, gpu have some space for them go. How much it helps on the high end I don't know, but in my low-end example going from 70 to capped 60 brought lows from middle 20s to middle 30. Obviously it's not always like that, but I recommend it as it seems consistent throughout titles I used.
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Chris
Who buys a new system to play old games all the time. Why not test newer games at 1080p to see where differences are? People that buy mid-range systems mostly play games. The Cyberpunk portion of the video is not showing the difference between the 7600x, and the 13600k, instead it compares them to the productivity platform.
Please re-run these tests with newer games, that take advantage of improvements in IPC for both platforms (if any).
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Who buys a new system to play old games all the time. Why not test newer games at 1080p to see where differences are? People that buy mid-range systems mostly play games. The Cyberpunk portion of the video is not showing the difference between the 7600x, and the 13600k, instead it compares them to the productivity platform.
Please re-run these tests with newer games, that take advantage of improvements in IPC for both platforms (if any).
reply
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