The Intel Core i5-13600K vs AMD Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 5 7600X rivalry is a heated battle in the heart of gamer country — the mid-range price points — with Intel's 13th-Gen Raptor Lake x86 hybrid architecture squaring off against AMD's chiplet-based Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 family.
These two fundamentally different approaches have shaken up our list of the best CPUs for gaming as the Intel vs AMD battle enters a new phase.
The Core i5-13600K’s pricing lands between the Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 5 7600X, so it’s challenged from both sides of the pricing spectrum. For Raptor Lake, Intel increased the number of small E-cores across its product stack, thus giving the Core i5 K model a total of 14 cores (a first for Core i5), and improved the chips' clock rates and cache to boost performance.
AMD's Ryzen 7000 chips come to market with an entirely new architecture and process node. The company uses only full-fledged Zen 4 cores that deliver 13% higher IPC, the TSMC 5nm process, faster clock speeds, and a new AM5 platform that drastically improves power delivery. All told, the Ryzen 7 and 5 processors represent a big step forward over the Zen 3 predecessors.
Both Ryzen 7000 and Raptor Lake's modern connectivity technologies bring big increases in throughput via DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 interfaces, but Intel also chose to continue to support DDR4 memory to offer a less-expensive path for builders. Meanwhile, AMD's decision to support only DDR5 has proven to be a pricing pain point.
Intel has also aggressively priced its newest silicon. As a result, the $319 Core i9-13900K's pricing contends with the $349 Ryzen 7 7700X and the $249 Ryzen 5 7600X, but the Intel chip is incredibly competitive in all manner of work against the more expensive 7700X, not to mention having lower overall platform costs.
Below we've taken the Core i5-13600K vs Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 5 7600X rivalry through a six-round faceoff to see which chips take the crown in our gaming and application benchmarks, along with other key criteria like power consumption and pricing. Let's see how they stack up.
Intel’s Core i5-13600K has a $319 recommended list price for the full-fledged model, and the graphics-less KF model goes for $294. You can often find the Intel chips roughly around that pricing at retail, but we can’t say the same for the AMD processors — the Ryzen 7 7700X has a suggested $399 price tag, while the Ryzen 5 7600X is officially $299.
However, you can find these chips for about $50 less, or around $349 and $249, respectively. AMD tells us it is currently running a holiday promotion, meaning these aren’t official price cuts, but these chips have maintained this pricing for about a month.
Additionally, AMD’s suggested pricing often has little to do with reality, so we think we’ll continue to see these chips in this price range. You should keep this in mind and make sure to check current pricing.
Intel still uses the 'Intel 7' process node for Raptor Lake but leveraged a newer revision of the silicon (the fifth) to push clock speeds higher while improving power efficiency. Intel's $319 fourteen-core Core i5-13600K comes with six hyper-threaded P-cores and eight single-threaded E-cores (20 threads).
That's an increase of four additional E-cores over the previous-gen Core i5-12600K, equating to more threaded horsepower. The 13600K's P-cores come with a 3.5 GHz base (a 200 MHz decline) and a 5.1 GHz boost (+200 MHz).
Meanwhile, the E-cores now have a 2.6 GHz base (+200 MHz) and stretch up to 3.9 GHz (+300 MHz). That means there are more E-cores, and you also get more out of each core.
The 13600K is also equipped with 24MB of L3 cache (+4MB) and 20MB of L2 (+10.5MB) and drops into existing 600-series motherboards or the new 700-series models.
The chip comes with the integrated UHD Graphics 770 engine with 32 EUs that boost up to 1.45 GHz. You can also save some cash with the Core i5-13600KF, which is identical but lacks the Intel UHD Graphics 770 engine, for $294.
Intel's chips now have a Processor Base Power (PBP) value in place of TDP and a secondary Maximum Turbo Power (MTP) value that denotes the highest power level during boost activity.
The 13600K comes with 125W PBP (base) and 181W MTP (peak) power ratings, which is a 31W higher MTP than the previous-gen model. You should also be aware that Intel's default boost duration for all K-series chips is unlimited. This means the chip can always operate at the 181W MTP when it is under load, though the actual power use will vary with application intensity.
AMD etches the Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 5 7600X on the TSMC 5nm process, yielding drastic gen-on-gen clock rate improvements. The eight-core 7700X comes with a 4.5 GHz base (+1.1 GHz) and a 5.4 GHz boost (+800 MHz).
The six-core Ryzen 5 7600X has a 4.7 GHz base (+1 GHz) and a 5.3 GHz boost clock (+700 MHz). AMD's new AM5 platform has significantly improved power delivery, allowing the company to extract more performance during strenuous multi-threaded workloads. Notably, the Ryzen models support hardware acceleration of AVX-512 instructions, whereas the 13600K does not.
The increased power draw has an effect, though — the 7700X and 7600X have a 105W TDP rating and a max power draw of 142W, the highest power consumption of the Ryzen 7 and 5 chips yet.
It's also much higher than the previous-gen’s 65W TDP rating. The Ryzen chips are designed to use the full thermal headroom available to deliver more performance, so they can safely operate at 95C under heavy load. We don’t see that much with the Ryzen 7 and 5 models, though.
The AM5 platform also marks AMD’s first mainstream LGA socket in recent history and supports the DDR5-5200 and PCIe 5.0 interfaces, largely matching Intel on the connectivity front.
However, AMD's AM5 platform only supports DDR5 memory, while Intel's 600- and 700-series chipsets support DDR5-5600 and DDR4-3200. AMD's decision to go all-in on DDR5 is one of the key reasons its platform costs are higher than Intel's — DDR5 still carries premium pricing but doesn't deliver large performance gains over DDR4 in most types of work, including gaming.
The AM5 platform is new, so the Ryzen 7000 chips aren't backward compatible with older AM4 motherboards. AMD will support AM5 until 2025+, meaning it should have an extended upgrade pathway.
The 7000 series marks the arrival of an integrated GPU for all of the mainstream Ryzen processors, a first. AMD designed the RDNA 2 iGPU to provide basic display output capabilities, so you shouldn’t expect it to support any meaningful gaming.
The RDNA 2 iGPU has two compute units, 4 ACE and 1 HWS. This is an important step forward for AMD's chips, as it helps in the OEM market and allows you to power a display or troubleshoot if you have an issue with your discrete GPU.
Winner: Tie
The Intel Core i5-13600K vs AMD Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 5 7600X battle yields a tie in this category. Both chips support DDR5 and the PCIe 5.0 interface, meaning neither has an inherent connectivity advantage.
However, Intel has the advantage of backward compatibility for DDR4, enabling lower-cost motherboards and memory for value seekers.
While AMD's new AM5 platform only supports pricey DDR5 and carries a premium over the Intel motherboard ecosystem, it does afford forward compatibility — AMD plans on supporting the AM5 platform until 2025+.
Meanwhile, Raptor Lake drops into previous-gen 600-series motherboards, providing a value option if the board has the correct BIOS. Still, the newer 700-series motherboards officially represent the end of the line for the LGA 1700 socket.
However, signs point to a refreshed family of Raptor Lake chips on the horizon, meaning there's a chance for one more generation of upgrades in the LGA 1700 platform.
Given its new hybrid architecture with two types of cores, Intel's core counts aren't directly comparable to AMDs due to their different capabilities. Our performance results will dictate the value of the overall designs.
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