Overall and Final Verdict
Well, the hits keep on coming, Intel has managed to push the limits even further now with the 13th Gen CPUs, especially with the i9-13900K which has a crazy max turbo speed of 5.8 GHz. In all of our single-core and single-thread tests, the 13900K took back the crown from AMD after their 7000 Series launch with a few of the tests even putting the 13600K ahead of those same CPUs as well in the single-core tests. That single-core performance and the crazy clock speeds helped with the in-game performance. Altogether the i9-13900K took the lead back from Intel in a majority of the tests by a small margin. The Ryzen 9 7950X did still come out ahead in the tests that were the most multi-threaded, while both CPUs have the same thread count the mixed core types of Intel’s CPUs were held back there, especially in wPrime which while there was a big improvement over last years 12900K the 13900K still struggled.
The i5-13600K on the other hand may not have been at the top of the charts, it did perform well above its weight class getting a lot closer to last year's 12900K in some tests than I would have expected. More importantly, it was consistently ahead of AMD's new Ryzen 7 7700X which has a higher MSRP making the i5-13600K very promising for the upper mid-range builds. Both the i9-13900K and the i5-13600K both do demand a lot of power when under heavy loads which is something to keep in mind when picking out your power supply. They also have high cooling demands, running them within Intel’s recommended PL1/PL2 and TccMax settings helped keep the temperatures well under what the AMD 7000 series CPUs were doing, but I still wouldn’t consider them cool running by any means. A large air cooler is possible, but water cooling is highly recommended, and the bigger the better.
As for pricing, the i9-13900K has an MSRP of $589 which for comparison the Ryzen 9 7900X is $549 and the 7950X is $699. The i9-13900K performance wise runs with the 7950X in some tests and comes in behind it in others but is consistently well above the 7900X which is closer in performance and I would say that getting close to the performance of the $699 7950X for $110 less (and being faster in single core applications) isn’t too bad. The i5-13600K on the other hand has an MSRP of $309 and as I have already mentioned was consistently ahead of the Ryzen 7 7700X which AMD has priced at $399, $90 more than the 13600K, making it a good value compared to the competition. The 13600K did go up in price by $20 compared to the 12600K where the 12900K and 13900K stayed the same price, but that doesn’t take away from its value compared to the 7700X. Intel also has the option to go with a DDR4-based motherboard where the 7000 Series of Ryzen is locked in with DDR5 and while DDR5 pricing has come down, a cheap 32GB kit is still going to cost you $50 more right now.
Live Pricing: HERE
Live Pricing: HERE
