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

As we mentioned earlier, we've tested with both DDR5-5200 and DDR5-6000 RAM for our Intel 13th-gen, Ryzen 7000 and Intel 12th-gen systems. For DDR4-based systems, including Intel 11th-gen and AMD Ryzen 5000, we're using DDR4-3600. The 6000MT/s results are labelled as such; if a result is unlabelled then it is DDR5-5200 for the DDR5 systems and DDR4-3600 for DDR4. We'll examine the impact of different DDR5 speeds in more detail on page five of this review.

Anyway - in these tests, we'll examine how the 13900K and 13600K behave in Cyberpunk 2077, as well as two recent releases from series that have featured prominently in our previous CPU benchmarks: Far Cry 6, renowned for its single-core reliance, and Crysis 3 Remastered, a Digital Foundry staple. We've opted for highly repeatable scenes here from a variety of sources here - an in-game cutscene, a brief open gameplay segment along a fixed route and an in-game benchmark.

Remember that you can mouse over the results in the tables below (as long as you're using a desktop browser rather than a phone) to get dynamically generated performance readouts for all processors we've tested. Meanwhile, clicking the graph swaps you into percentages, making it a bit easier to judge relative performance at a glance.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is our second RT benchmark, showing how RT performance can add even more load to the CPU and cause CPU bottlenecking in some scenarios. This benchmark, taken from a motorcycle run along the busy city streets, also demonstrates the game's reliance on high-speed memory, with big performance advantages evident with DDR5-6000 over DDR5-5200.

The whole Intel 13th-gen family seems to perform well here, with nearly 120fps averages for both the 13900K and 13600K - only margin of error differences separate them. We may be starting to run into GPU limits here, with Ryzen 7000 processors paired with 6000MT/s RAM also resulting in similar scores. RTX 4090 retest, anyone?

Far Cry 6

The single-core reliance from Far Cries past returns in the sixth instalment of the franchise. That holds the 13900K and 13600K in great stead, with equivalent results for the 13900K and 13600K that are a healthy ~10 percent ahead of the nearest Ryzen 7000 competition. Those 5.8GHz boost clocks on the 13900K really come in handy here, while the relatively modest core utilisation suggests that turning off the E cores (a one-click setting in the Z790 Aorus Master BIOS) could result in even better results.

Crysis 3 Remastered

Crysis 3 Remastered allows us to revisit our favourite scene from early on in the original game's campaign, which oscillates between character closeups and complex distant geometry to load both CPU and GPU. Once again, I think we're starting to edge towards GPU limitations here even with DLSS performance engaged, with the 12900K outdoing the 13900K. Regardless, Intel's latest generations are doing better than AMD's equivalents, with the 13900K leading the 7900X by a solid eight percent.

Now let's move onto one final spot of game testing, where have a look at how the 13900K and 13600K at three different RAM frequencies. Where's the price/performance sweet spot for DDR5?

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 [this page]
• Gaming benchmarks: Memory bandwidth analysis
• Z790: platform overview and motherboard analysis
• Intel Core i9 13900K and Core i5 13600K: the Digital Foundry verdict