We recently saw a complete performance review of the Intel Core i9-13900K, a processor that will become the chip giant’s next flagship, and today we can share with you a first performance test of an engineering sample of the Intel Core i5-13600Ka chip that will succeed the Intel Core i5-12600K, and that frankly has left me quite impressed, since it has been able to outperform the Ryzen 9 5950X.
First of all it is necessary to put context to the result that we are going to see. The Ryzen 9 5950X It is the most powerful processor that AMD has right now in the general consumer market, it has 16 cores and 32 threads and its price was between 800 and 900 euros. At the time of writing this article, its price has dropped to 580 euros due to the Alder Lake-S competition.
The Intel Core i5-13600K will be, by contrast, a mid-range processor for “enthusiastic” users who want to enjoy a high level of performance while making a contained investment. This means that it will position itself in a clearly lower range than the Ryzen 9 5950X, and that it will be much cheaper than that. The official prices are not yet known, but I dare to say that it will be between 300 and 350 euros.
With that clear difference, it is very easy to understand why this first performance test of the Intel Core i5-13600K in CPU-Z has left us pleasantly surprised, and that is that said processor has overwhelmed the Ryzen 9 5950X in monothreadand it has remained just a little below in multithreading, as we can see in the attached image. It is important to keep in mind that we are dealing with an engineering sample, which means that its working frequencies should be lower than those of the commercial version, and that it will therefore perform a little more.
In Cinebench R23 the Intel Core i5-13600K achieves a score of 1,387 in single thread and 24,420 points in multithread, which represents a 40% improvement in multithread performance and a considerable drop in single-thread performance. The person responsible for this analysis has not explained why this marked contrast has occurred, with a notable increase and a significant drop, but it is clear that it is due to what we have said previously, that we are facing an engineering sample and that their maximum working frequencies are quite limited.
From what I have seen, working temperatures are around 78 degrees, a high level but totally safe. In the final version of the Intel Core i5-13600K we can expect more contained valuesand also a more adjusted consumption, since this engineering sample reached 173 degrees in PL2 mode, but everything seems to indicate that the commercial version will not exceed 160 watts.
Full specifications of the Intel Core i5-13600K
- Raptor Lake-S generation, successor to Alder Lake-S.
- Manufactured on Intel 7 node (10nm enhanced).
- 6 high-performance cores based on Raptor Cove architecture at 4.9GHz-5.1GHz (engineering sample used, will be higher in final version).
- 8 high-efficiency cores based on the Gracemont architecture at 3.9 GHz (4 GHz in tests).
- 20 threads thanks to HyperThreading technology, which allows each high-performance core to handle one process and one thread.
- 44MB cache (L2 + L3).
- 125 Watt TDP (PL1).
- Unlocked multiplier.
- Intel Iris Xe GPU.
