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

Despite AMD's Ryzen 7000 chips offering a comprehensive upgrade over their predecessors, Intel's 13th-gen chips have clawed back the gaming crown based on our testing.

The Core i9 13900K claims higher average frame-rates than the 7900X in eight of the nine games we tested, with only Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition showing a clear preference for AMD hardware. We saw a very consistent nine percent advantage for the 13900K over the 7900X when both chips used DDR5-6000 RAM, even in Ryzen mainstays like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which suggests that AMD will need to rely on their X3D designs if they want to challenge Intel this generation.

Team Blue also wins the battle of the mid-range, with the 13600K outclassing the 7600X in six games, tying in one game (Flight Sim 2020) and losing in two (Metro and CS:GO). In the 13600K-winning titles, the advantage was narrow - less than 10 percent in most cases.

In terms of gen-on-gen improvements, we saw the greatest results for the new CPUs in Flight Simulator 2020 where the 13900K was 14 percentage points clear of the 12900K and nine points clear of the 7900X. Elsewhere, gains were more modest, with improvements from 12900K to 13900K often in the five to eight percent region. The 13600K also did well, with a 10 to 15 percent lead over the 12600K in many titles, dropping to around a five point advantage in the remainder.

In fact, some of our 1080p results seem to indicate that we're GPU-limited at some points, suggesting we might see even greater average frame-rates (and percentage gains) with a faster graphics card in the system - so a retest with an RTX 4090 might well make sense. (If there are any GPU makers reading that would like to help us out with this, please feel free to get in touch.)

While the gaming performance here is stellar, it's the content creation wins that I didn't expect. The 13900K is an absolute star here, claiming a ~50 percent advantage over the Ryzen 9 5950X and 12900K (!!) in Cinebench R20 and a ~40 percent improvement in our Handbrake encode test. Those are truly bonkers numbers, but I guess when you're throwing an extra eight efficiency cores, 600MHz max turbo and 100W at the problem then you do expect to see a better-than-average generational improvement.

The 13600K also does well, besting the 7600X by 40 percent in Handbrake and 52 percent in Cinebench thanks to its greater core count and higher clock speeds. While Ryzen 5000 remains a great value proposition for content creators, these numbers are sure to cause concern at AMD given Ryzen's historical strength here.

Of course, as someone in the Spider-Man universe once said, with great performance comes great power consumption and waste heat. How wise they were, as that's true for the 13900K and 13600K too - we're looking at quite high power numbers in the worst-case scenario, where we measured up to 473W with an AVX workload (transcoding into H.265) for the 13900K on Z790 compared to 373W for the 12900K on Z690. With a 1000W PSU and hefty 360mm AiO on our system, we didn't run into any issues, with the CPU sitting at 50-60 degrees in most gaming scenarios, but these are extra expenses you'll need to take into account if you're planning a 13900K build - or you'll need to accept lower performance by enforcing stricter power limits.

Beyond this, the major unanswered question we have following our initial testing regards Intel 13th-gen performance on Z690 boards. Our own testing was significantly delayed by extremely low content creation scores on Z690, alongside boot issues, so it will be interesting to see if other Z690 users report problems and how long it takes any issues to be ironed out with BIOS updates. Hopefully we had a one-off issue, but we'll monitor the sitatuion carefully.

In closing then, I'm pleasantly surprised by what Intel has wrought here. The content creation gains are hugely impressive, and the gaming numbers are enough to give Intel an advantage going into the holiday season when so many people are looking to build their next PC. It'll be interesting to see where Intel go from here, especially once AMD's promised X3D designs land in the months to follow. After years of modest improvements in a static CPU landscape, the rise of Ryzen and Intel's resurgence are producing some fascinating results.

Intel Core i9 13900K and Core i5 13600K analysis

• Introduction, test rig and content creation benchmarks
• Gaming benchmarks: Flight Simulator 2020, Hitman 3
• Gaming benchmarks: Counter-Strike: GO, Metro Exodus EE, Black Ops Cold War
• Gaming benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6, Crysis 3 Remastered
• Gaming benchmarks: Memory bandwidth analysis
• Z790: platform overview and motherboard analysis
• Intel Core i9 13900K and Core i5 13600K: the Digital Foundry verdict [this page]