Intel Core i7-13700K Review: Core i9 Gaming at the i7 Price

Intel’s $409 13th Gen Core i7-13700K slots into the middle of Intel’s Raptor Lake product stack (or at least its product stack as of late October 2022), delivering the lion’s share of gaming performance from its market-leading counterpart, the $589 Core i9-13900K, in tandem with more than enough power in productivity workloads for most users – but for $180 less. It also easily outperforms the competing AMD Ryzen 7000 chip, making it one of the best CPUs for gaming and a top in our CPU benchmark hierarchy.

The Core i7-13700K’s performance comes from its 5.4GHz boost clock, a record for the i7 family, and Intel’s addition of four more electronic cores, bringing the chip to 16 cores and 24 threads in total. Even though Intel still uses the “Intel 7” process node, it has taken advantage of a new silicon revision to increase clock speeds while improving power efficiency. Intel also burned the cores to a new larger die and added additional L3 and L2 caches.

Intel’s continued aggressive chip pricing and low-cost platform and memory options make the Core i7-13700K a powerful, yet more affordable option: The Core i7-13700K is the best processor for gaming at its price and also delivers top performance in our application benchmarks at a significantly lower price than AMD’s competing Ryzen 7 7700X, and it even challenges the $549 Ryzen 9 7900X in most jobs.

Intel Core i7-13700K Processor Specifications and Price

Just like the previous generation chips, the 13th Gen Raptor Lake processors come with a mix of big performance cores (p-cores) for latency-sensitive work and small efficiency cores (e-cores) for threaded and background applications. The e-cores retain the same Gracemont architecture as before, but the p-cores move from the Golden Cove design to Raptor Cove. For more on the architecture, check out our Intel Core i9-13900K and Core i5-13600K review.

The $409 16-core, 24-thread Core i7-13700K competes against the $399, 16-thread eight-core Ryzen 7 7700X. Intel has increased the p-core boost frequency of the 13700K by 400 MHz over its predecessor, bringing it up to 5.4 GHz. Intel also added four more e-cores for a total of eight, and a 400 MHz increase in the e-core boost brings it up to 4.2 GHz. The combination of higher clocks and more cores provides a huge leap forward in multi-threaded workloads.

The Core i7-13700K has the same 125W CPU base power (PBP – the amount of power the chip draws when not in a fully boosted state) as the gen Core i7-12700K. former. However, Intel has increased the maximum turbo power (MTP), the maximum amount of power the chip can draw when in a boosted state. The new 253W limit is a whopping 63W increase over the previous generation Core i7-12700K (33% increase).

Intel’s new chips are the most energy efficient to date. But like AMD, Intel has taken a power approach to regaining leadership, raising power limits for all desktop PC chips. The heat can be hard to control, so you’ll need to pack a beefy fry cooler. Intel does not include a cooler with the Core i7-12700K but recommends a 280mm AIO water cooler or air equivalent (or better). Existing LGA 1700 coolers are compatible with new motherboards. Keep in mind that your cooler’s performance can severely limit chip performance, so it’s best to overprovision, especially if you plan to overclock.

On the other hand, you can now easily overclock to the highest clock rates we’ve ever seen, and that’s even without using exotic cooling. For example, we dialed in a 5.5 GHz all-core overclock with an AIO water cooler with the Core i7-13700K.

Intel also increased the 13700K’s L2 cache from 1.25MB to 2MB for each p-core and doubled the amount of L2 cache for each e-core cluster to 4MB. Intel also added 5MB of cache Additional L3.

Intel has increased its DDR5 memory support up to 5600 MT/s when using one DIMM per channel (1DPC), a big increase from the previous speed of 4800 MT/s with Alder Lake. Equally important, Intel has increased 2DPC speeds up to 4400 MT/s, an improvement over the previous generation’s 3600 MT/s. Unlike AMD’s all-in-one approach with DDR5, Raptor Lake also supports DDR4-3200 memory, ensuring a value option for Intel platforms.

Raptor Lake falls into motherboards with the LGA 1700 socket, so it will work with existing 600-series or new 700-series chipsets. Intel says that on a comparable basis, you shouldn’t see any performance differences if you are using a previous generation 600 series motherboard for Raptor Lake. As usual, Intel has Z-series (Z790, in this case) motherboards available initially, with the value-focused B and H-series coming when the rest of the Raptor Lake line launches.

The 700 series motherboards have minor improvements over the 600 series, but Intel has increased the number of PCIe 4.0 lanes dangling from the chipset to 20, an increase of eight more lanes, and support for another port USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 200Gps, bringing the total to five. As before, the Raptor Lake chip itself supports 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes and four PCIe 4.0 lanes for a storage device.