Intel Core i9-13900K

$1,099 | ]www.intel.com Unleash the beast.

If you’re after a CPU that delivers performance above all other considerations, the 13900K is the 13th Gen model for you. It’s more than just an overclocked 12900K. It gains an additional eight E-cores giving it a total of 8 P cores and 16 E cores for a total of 32 threads, which just happens to match the thread count of AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X.

At $1,099, it’s only $30 more than the 12900K’s launch price. Considering inflation over the last year, along with the drop in the value of the Aussie dollar, it’s relatively better value, and notably, it’s cheaper than the price of the AMD’s 7950X at $1,139.

Two P cores can boost as high as 5.8GHz while the E cores can boost to 4.3GHz. Under an all core load the P-Cores can reach as high as 5.4GHz. That’s amazing, really. The 13900K contains the maximum available 32MB of L2 cache and 36MB of L3 cache. So, it’s got more cores, much higher frequencies and more cache than the 12900k.

Other key features include Intel UHD770 graphics and support for DDR5-5600, though it retains compatibility with DDR4 memory too, supporting DDR4-3200 memory. In reality though, all 13th Gen processors will support faster memory, with a new wave of DDR5-7000MHz and higher kits coming to market.

The 13900K is designed to perform at all costs. The extra E cores and higher clock speeds give it the edge it needs to take the all-round performance crown. Its multi-threading performance in particular is excellent. The 13900K finally matches or beats AMD which for a few generations has excelled at heavily threaded tasks.

The higher boost clock speeds give it an edge in gaming and lightly threaded tasks too. Now that Intel’s hardware level Thread Director has matured, along with a year of Windows development, the 13th Generation range and 700 series motherboards in general combine into a mature all-round platform.

But there’s one area Intel has yet to address, that’s if it’s even attempting to. Power consumption continues to creep upwards. The PL2 power limit increases to 253W, but when unlocked, that can rise to well over 300W for the CPU alone, and that provides a cooling challenge. Our 360mm AIO cooler wasn’t enough to keep the 13900K from hitting 100C and throttling under heavy loads.

With that in mind, unless you have top of the line water cooling or you’re fortunate to have a good chip, there’s little headroom left for manual overclocking. However, memory overclocking is much better, our chip had no problem hitting DDR5-7000 and surely has some headroom left.

If you’re an enthusiast chasing the best performance, the 13900K is the CPU for you, but it comes at a cost in terms of money, power consumption and resulting cooling requirements. Perhaps the biggest competition for the 13900K comes not from AMD, but Intel’s own 13700K and 13600K, both of which deliver performance that’s almost as good (unless you really require multi core grunt).

12th Gen Alder Lake was Intel’s best architecture in many years and the 13900K takes it to the next level, extracting everything from the Intel 7 process. Just make sure you have top spec cooling, otherwise it will throttle, negating its performance advantage.

The 13900K sits on the top step of the desktop CPU podium, though for most users, the spectacular i7 and i5 K models are better buys. ------

Core i9-13900K; LGA 1700 socket; 8 P-Cores + 16 E-Cores, 32 threads; P-core Base/Max Clock Speed 3.0/5.8GHz, Single E-core Base/Max Clock speed 2.2/4.3GHz; 36MB L3 Cache; 125W Base Power, 253W Maximum Turbo Power.

"The 13900K is designed to perform at all costs. The extra E cores and higher clock speeds give it the edge it needs to take the all-round performance crown."