Intel Core i7 13700K Review

Peter Donnell / 2 years ago

Raptor Lake is here and to start off our extensive coverage of the 13th generation of processors, we’re doing things a little differently. While I’m sure lots of media outlets are taking a look at the i5 13600K and i9 13900K, we’ll have those in the coming days, but we actually managed to source our own i7 13700K which I feel could be a strong contender for those looking to spend a somewhat reasonable amount of money, while getting the very best performance, mainly in terms of gaming.

Intel Core i7 13700K

So the i7 13700K, codenamed Raptor Lake. I don’t want to delve too much into the ins and outs of it, because we have an unboxing video that goes through all of that from the other day, so that’s definitely worth checking out below if you want a bit more of a deep dive into things.

Specifications

It is worth looking at the main specs though. So the i7 13700K is a 16-core processor comprising of 8 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores, of which as per usual, much like the 12th gen, the performance cores all have hyper-threading, giving us a total of 24 threads. Clock speed-wise, with the right cooler to keep things under control, you’ll be able to boost up to 5.4GHz, a healthy 8% uplift from the 12700K’s maximum boost clock. The gains don’t stop there as the 13700K comes with 24MB of L2 cache and 30MB of L3 cache, or as Intel call it, Smart Cache. Being a K series processor, also means that the 13700K can be overclocked beyond its rated spec, and that’s something we’ll likely look at in further content after we’ve gone through the stock performance of all of the chips launching today.

The 13700K keeps the maximum number of PCIe lanes at 20 as well as the base power at 125 Watts though the PL1 and PL2 power draw has seen an increase from 190 Watts on the 12700K to a staggering 253 Watts. As you’d expect, there’s support through the 13700K for DDR4 and DDR5 but the accepted speed of DDR5 has now been increased to 5600MT/s or MHz, up from 4800MHz on the 12700K and comes with the same Intel UHD 770 graphics iGPU built onto the CPU.