Intel Core i9 13900K Review

Overall Game Average FPS

Testing a variety of games allows you to see how a particular piece of hardware performs in that title, but with the ability to look at overall game averages and how they perform across all titles, we can extrapolate positioning of that hardware compared to similar hardware on the market.

Ok, so, if you’ve already checked out our content on the 13700K, we had to talk about where it fits in, between various processors from the existing lineup, and of course, compared to AMD, but the i9 13900K is a bit of a simpler story. Now, when it comes to synthetics, it’s a beast. So much so, that it feels like some of the software, like Firestrike, just isn’t optimised for it, while other benchmarks, like Timespy, 7Zip, Cinebench, Geekbench and anything to do with rendering, just laps up every drop of performance that the Raptor Lake i9 processor had to offer. Obviously, to get the most out of it, you’ll want to be on Windows 11, with certain things enabled, but even then, we did some testing on the side and saw, there wasn’t huge amounts of performance there on top of what we already had.

Now, gaming is a slightly different story, because it can be argued one of many ways. Depending on the game you play, will kind of dictate as to what direction you go, but also looking at the overall averages, gives you an indication as to how things compare across the whole spectrum of tests, and it’s here where we see AMD just ahead, but not by much, though the 13900K just make up for it with the better performance in the dips, and them 1% lows. Sadly, while the performance is fantastic, so are the products from the competition, and even from themselves, with the 13700K performing about the same, and that’s where cost per frame comes in, which does see the 13900K coming in cheaper in the UK than the 7950X per frame by around 10%, though as you look further down the stack, yes, it works out cheaper, but remember, this is only focussing on gaming performance, which was pretty great on every CPU we tested here today.