Intel Core i9 13900K and Core i5 13600K review: an effective redoubt against AMD's Ryzen 7000 advances

With AMD’s Ryzen 7000 chips firmly on store shelves, it’s now time for Intel to shoot their shot. Team Blue’s 13th-gen chips arrive today, and on paper they represent a huge upgrade over 12th-gen despite compatibility with existing Z690 (and new Z790) boards. You get higher clock speeds (up to 5.8GHz!), more efficiency cores, more L3 cache and higher power targets – all of which you’d charitably expect to contribute to a significant uptick in gaming and content creation performance.

To discover if these processors live up to the hype, we’ve been testing the $589 Core i9 13900K and $319 Core i5 13600K in gaming and content creation benchmarks since last week. Our plan going in was simple: to find out exactly how much better these 13th-gen models are than their 12th-gen predecessors, as well as how they measure up to AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 and popular Ryzen 5000 alternatives – including the excellent Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

As with our Ryzen 7000 testing, we’ve opted to check two RAM configurations for each new processor: DDR5-5200, representing ‘budget’ DDR5, and DDR5-6000, the AMD-identified sweet spot for price versus performance. We’ve also done some more in-depth RAM testing on page five, showing the maximum gains you can expect to see from opting for specialist high-speed RAM over more pedestrian models.

The 13900K and 13600K represent the upper and lower bounds of the initial Raptor Lake range – otherwise, there’s a $409 Core i7 13700K in the middle and ‘F’ variants that cost $25 less but don’t include integrated graphics. As usual, we expect to see cheaper Core i5 and Core i3 models later on, where we could see even better value propositions if 12th-gen is any indication.