Review: Intel Raptor Lake i9-13900K and i5-13600K

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CPU overclocking:

A new platform means time to adapt, but since we are quite close to the Z690 chipset, we shouldn’t have too much trouble. We will just have to take into account the new specificities of the processors in terms of frequencies.

Protocol:

Before starting, it is necessary to have one or more reference scores with our i9-13900K/i5-13600K at stock frequencies , i.e., without having made any modification except for having activated the XMP profile. It is also very important to have a sheet of paper at hand that will allow you to note down all the tests you are going to perform as well as the results or failures. Personally, I have hundreds of sheets of my tests on which I sometimes go back to know how the processor behaved on such motherboard or in such test conditions. My own little bible.

For H24 overclocking, you will of course have to take more time to fine-tune the voltage in order to provide it with the minimum necessary but also to adjust each core independently if you want to take advantage of the maximum performance.

Load-Line Calibration in BIOS:

In the case of Rocket Lake, even if Asus advises a Level 4 for overclocking, I opted for a Level 7 in order to have the least vdroop possible. Basically, I want the voltage chosen to be as close as possible to the load voltage. In the tables below, you can see the selected voltage, the effective voltage in idle and finally in load . The readings are made with a multimeter at the PCB of the motherboard. It is very important to know the real voltage brought to the different components but especially to your processor.

Overclocking under watercooling in different stages:

As usual, I will start the tests by choosing, via the BIOS, a starting frequency applied on the 8 P-Cores of the i9-13900K. I chose a starting frequency of 5500 MHz with a multiplier of 55, a BCLK of 100, a voltage of 1.20 volt and a Level 7. All the other options are in AUTO. For the i5-13600K, we will start from 5100 MHz (51 x 100). The idea is then, in the OS, to test the stability on several runs of Cinebench R23 multithreaded . If it’s stable, I increase the frequency by 100 MHz while rechecking the stability. If the benchmark crashes, I increase the voltage by 0.05 volt steps in order to find a stability allowing to run the benchmark. The objective is to get a “quick” idea of the maximum benchmarkable frequency.

Here is what we obtained for the i9-13900K. As you can see, we were very quickly limited by the temperature and this despite a rather low voltage.

Our best score is 41796 at Cinebench R23 but with temperatures between 90 and 100°C. We will see how it behaves under LN2. The i5-13600K had some good surprises for us!

We were able to reach a frequency of 5.6 GHz on the P-Core, 4.6 GHz on the E-Core and raise the uncore frequency to 5.0 GHz. The temperatures are rather well contained, which allows us to pass the R23 single score to 27477 points (24274 at stock) and the multi score to 2214 points (2013 at stock).

The excellent performance in benchmarks combined with its excellent overclocking potential should make it one of the most popular Raptor Lake processors.