Another purported Intel Core i9-13900K video has surfaced on Bilibili (opens in new tab), the Chinese video streaming site. Erjin Homemade Taobao (EHT) compared an alleged Intel Core i9-13900K engineering sample (ES) against a Core i9-12900K on the same platform; an MSI Z690 Godlike with Colorful DDR5-4800 RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card. For extra interest, an AIO 360mm liquid cooler tamed both CPUs. The reviewer tested both application benchmarks and games.
Unfortunately, we don’t know the Raptor Lake chip’s ES revision, but it is likely to be recent. Images of the processor are visible within the video, but the chip engraving, except for ‘Intel Confidential,’ has been obscured.
EHT would characterize this testing session as a “brief analysis,” for reference only if anyone were tempted to take it too seriously. Nevertheless, they provide a decently thorough test comparison. One of the first slides shared clarifies the differences between the two processors dueling in the video. Those keeping up with coverage of Raptor Lake’s development will know the significant change with the newer chip doubling the number of E cores, delivering an 8P + 16E processor with 32 threads at its disposal. The 13th Gen Core chip also has bigger caches and higher clocks in its favor – but getting to those higher speeds can push the power envelope.
As mentioned in the intro, EHT did several tests on apps and games. As well as ‘stock’ tests, other results were gathered by iso-clocking the Core i9-13900K and Core i9-12900K P-cores to 5.2 GHz. Thus, you will usually see four results for all the apps/games in the comparison charts.
In CPU-Z and Cinebench testing, the Raptor Lake did better in nT tests, with many extra cores available. However, the 1T tests were less convincing – as the newer gen processor came second in these tests in CPU-Z.
There appeared to be some problems with the Core i9-13900K ES for gaming tests. In two of the biggest games tested, Cyberpunk 2077 and Forza 5, the Alder Lake predecessor came out on top in the first set of tests with processors running with their complete set of P- and E-cores. As a result, EHT had to push the Raptor Lake to 5.5 GHz (performance cores only) to ensure its overall supremacy. Indeed, this video isn’t the best showing of Raptor Lake we have seen.
Intel’s 13th Gen Core ‘Raptor Lake’ CPUs reportedly launch on September 28, with availability starting from October 10, according to recent leaks. For more information about Intel’s next-gen processors and the updated platform please check out our regularly updated Intel 13th-Gen Raptor Lake Specs, Rumored Release Date, Benchmarks, and More article.