The Intel Core i5 13600K may not be the most powerful Raptor Lake processor, but it could be the best gaming CPU for those who don’t need the extra performance that comes with more premium i7 and i9 models. That said, new benchmarks indicate that it may be surprisingly performant for a mid-range chip, offering substantial gains over its 12th Gen counterpart.
After getting their hands on an Intel Core i5 13600K engineering sample, hardware leaker ECSM_Official has since put the processor through Cinebench R23 and CPU-Z benchmarks. The results look very promising, especially considering that this chip doesn’t have all the optimisations that the retail CPU will.
In both CPU-Z and Cinebench multicore benchmarks, the Intel Core i5 13600K left its predecessor in the dust with respective scores of 10,031 (+79%) and 24,420 (+40%), likely due to its higher clock speeds and higher core/thread count (via Videocardz). Strangely, though, the chip actually performed worse in single core tests, but this could be symptomatic of it being an engineering sample.
While we should take these results with a pinch of salt, it seems like Intel Raptor Lake processors could deliver a significant performance uplift compared to their 12th Gen counterparts. Whether this will be enough to hold off against AMD Ryzen 7000 remains to be seen, but we shouldn’t have to wait much longer to find out, as both companies are rumoured to launch their next-gen chips later this year.