Intel Core i9-13900 'Raptor Lake' CPU review arrives, 3 months early

Intel's next-gen 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPU will be launching in a few month's time, but the upcoming Core i9-13900 has already been taken around the benchmarking route... and it's shaping up very nicely against Alder Lake.

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The new Core i9-13900 sample is labeled "Q0D8" and is recognized as an ES1 (an early engineering sample) and was benched against the current Core i9-12900K processor. Expreview is using a high-end ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme motherboard, with the Core i9-13900 "Raptor Lake" ES1 sample has the same 8 Performance cores, and 16 Efficient cores as what the retail CPU will have, but in its engineering sample form, there is a much lower CPU clock speed than ANY of the retail 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors.

Intel's new Core i9-13900 was sitting at 3.8GHz Turbo Boost on its Performance cores, which is much lower than its +5GHz speeds that the retail Raptor Lake CPUs will burst out of the gate with. The new 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs will also have updated Performance cores based on the Raptor Cove CPU architecture, meanwhile, the Gracemont CPU architecture.

There are some smaller changes, with the sample that Expreview had in its hands had 36MB of cache in total -- that's 6MB more cache than the Core i9-12900K that was used in the comparison.

CPU clock-wise, the Intel Core i9-13900 processor in "ES1" form had its P-cores clocking between 1.4GHz and 3.8GHz, while the E-cores were running at between 1.0GHz and 2.0GHz depending on the task. Nothing here is solid right now, with CPU clock inconsistencies spotted by Wccftech, too.

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Alongside the ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme motherboard an Intel Core i9-13900 "ES1" processor, was 32GB of DDR5 memory (clocked at DDR5-5200). Expreview notes that the motherboard BIOS isn't optimized for the Raptor Lake CPU, but support is there.

In some quick and dirty benchmarks, the Core i9-13900 "ES1" is compared against the Core i9-12900K, where it beats it in multi-threaded workloads by 25%, and in single-threaded tests by around 10%. This is without optimizations, an early engineering sample, lack of proper BIOS support, and more... it'll be interesting to see the final results when Intel launches its new 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs later this year.