Intel Core i9-13900K: What Real Users Actually Think

13900K can be very efficient if you turn down the wattage but it's pushed to very high limits to get the last few percentage points of performance out. With a 360 AIO, you can run it at higher wattage.

Gamer's Nexus's contact who has 8 million Intel 13th and 14th gens are seeing failure rates of 10-25%, you're probably in the 75%.

Yes it's an inefficient chip, a slight undervolt or power limit would do wonders for the temps, but the 360mm radiator with a good airflow case should be able to keep it under control. It's not going to die any faster, processors are designed to downclock before that happens.

13900K shouldn't be an option since the best gaming cpu is the 7800X3d. Much cooler and efficient, doesn't throttle, can be air cooled.

Most user applications including games don't scale well into multicore, anything beyond 6 or 8 cores is a waste for them. If you do happen to use an application that can scale indefinitely with core count, you will gain more performance from the 16 E cores, rather than 4 additional P cores.

I think you're almost certainly good, mate. If it's been running those workloads for over a year, I doubt you'll see issues with it before it's irrelevant and you want to upgrade anyway. One thing you can do is ensure you've got the latest bios and imposed Intel's recommended limits for your CPU.

I'd recommend people at least look at the power scaling chart. The efficiency gap peaks at 115w where the 7950x beats the 13900k by 56% in R23. This really jumps out to me as someone in a warmer climate that likes the idea of running CPUs in the 100-150w range.

13900K is one of the hottest CPUs on the market. It uses up to 250W of power out of the box, 300W if you increase the voltage by the smallest amount. A 360MM AIO is effectively a requirement without undervolting. You will not be running a 13900K at 70C without a custom water loop or subambient cooling.

My i9-14900K failed in the way fail means. There was no tweaking or recommended setting that could bring it back to life. People have to RMA this shit if they are lucky and are under warranty. If not they are SOL and have ewaste on their hands.

What a whole nothing burger this article turned out to be. 'If your crashing in certain games then you should probably undervolt or underclock or limit power limits.' Or just RMA the cpu since it should be stable at stock settings.

I've been preaching this for a few weeks now. They're focused on the wrong number though. Most people are just putting bios on auto which isn't stock settings. The current limit is the real culprit — setting PL1/PL2 to Intel spec and dialing in ICC makes a massive difference.

Update BIOS to latest. Apply Intel's performance or baseline profile settings for your chip in the BIOS options. Run Wendell's stress test regimen with y-cruncher and 7-zip. If the stress tests pass, it is likely you are in the stable group.

Both AMD and Intel are good options right now. Unless you're doing productivity workloads, nobody really needs the i9 or R9 part. The i9 is overkill for gaming.

Prebuilt PCs and insufficient CPU cooling, name a more iconic duo.

The definition of stock settings are kinda washed. If mobo makers would actually enforce the stock PL1/PL2 instead of even removing the limits altogether, these problems likely wouldn't be a thing. But if you limit your CPU to 125W instead of unlimited 350W+, you lose out on 10% performance, and you wouldn't need a 360 AIO, but that's considered bad for many.

I have the same proc. Read the same stuff. Went down same rabbit hole. I ended up buying and yes it ran hot, WHEN benchmarking which involves every core maxed out which is just not real world. I game and use it for work and have 0 issues with running hot and now at the point I am not even actively monitoring anymore. Great proc, I would buy it again.

Crazy power consumption. Cannot be cooled to reasonable level even with best cooling solutions.

I am quite disappointed overall with both Zen 4 and now Raptor. Looking at the 12 game average, cost wise, the 5800X3D looks like the only option that makes sense for my use case. Might wait the next Vcache models or just skip this generation entirely.

I'm actually running a i9-13900k right now. Most people say it basically thermal throttles out of the box, and while that's true to some degree, that's not a fault with the cpu itself, but with mobos as they attempt to essentially overclock your cpu until it thermal throttles. There are settings to disable this which results in stable and usable temps.

I've had mine since it first came out. Only a slight 0.05 undervolt and recently synced all cores to 56. Running great.

I can verify that I was having the same issues with my 14900k and this method of setting default power limits fixed my problem. CPU clocked to 5.7 ghz on 14900k, ICC 307, PL1 253, PL2 253. Since running default wattage settings the CPU boosts anywhere from 5.3ghz to 5.7ghz depending on the game.

The fact that he wasn't able to cool it to prevent throttling is a little bit alarming. It seems like if you really want to get the most out of the 13900K you'll need a custom water cooling loop as even a 360mm AIO couldn't pull it off. Granted for most games, this won't matter much, and the platform offers considerable financial advantages over Zen 4 while being roughly on par in performance.

So your use case is 4k games? 7800x3d spanks all bins of 13900ks. About 12%. It's not even close in certain titles that can use the extra cache with up to a 35% lead. It also does this while using half the power. I've seen 13900ks thermal throttle with larger AIOs than 360mm. Its thermals suck.

You don't need a flagship 24 core CPU for music production. Those are more for video production or creative design etc. Right now 8 cores or less is more than you need.

Power limit 253w, offset -0.100mv, stock clocks, 360mm AIO. Both my 13700k and my friends 13900k have idle at 32c and 65c at 100% load. You may need a 360 AIO.

In some games having e-cores even leads to stuttering or microstuttering. Some people disable them in the BIOS to get better gaming performance, in which case you're stuck with an 8 core CPU for both gaming AND other tasks.

Depends, most of the power consumption complaints really only come from synthetic benchmarks. On a typical day my 13900K doesn't exceed 170W with 99% of the time being under 25W. The only time it exceeds 100W is when compiling a project in visual studio. During gaming 99% of the time it is under 120W, with most games consuming <100W.

It's because intel can't make a real 16 core cpu without pulling over 300w which is uncoolable.

I have a fresh build from last November. 13900k and 4090. I have Corsair 7000D and H170i AOI (420mm). Zero problems with cooling. You've just gotta get a beefy AOI or custom loop and you're good to go. I've loved it.

I have zero issues with my 13900 on a 360 AIO overclocked to 5.6 all core 6.1 3 core. I run 40k on cinebench at max temps of 89. Idle is 28 and gaming at 60 max.

14900k, on z790 dark hero, started great, degraded over something like 3-4 months until I couldn't even get it into windows with a reset bios and a warm chip. RMAed it, and bought another, replaced the board with apex encore, I think we're 3 weeks later now, same shit. Fucking hate 14th gen.

I have a i9 13900kf. Its amazing. Just the single core performance rocks hard. Let alone the multi core.

The 13900k will be more than plenty for music. In Ableton, and most DAWs, every channel uses 1 thread. If you have a 24 core machine, you have 48 threads all able to be dedicated to their own individual Ableton channel before you'd have to start splitting the workload.

Set Lite Load to mode 2, CPU load line calibration to mode 6, voltage to adaptive plus offset of negative 0.05, power limit to 253W, CPU current limit 400, turbo enhanced disabled. This will get you above 40K in Cinebench.

Having the same problem, on my 2nd i9-13900k and problems are arising again, had this 2nd one for barely 5 months now. Hate this gen, not looking forward to rma'ing for the 3rd time.

I have had ENDLESS issues with this very problem. Coming from an IT support background I worked through the problem the best I could, game re-installs, software re-installs, RAM tests, re-seated the CPU, re-installed Windows all that jazz but had no luck.

Sync all P cores to 55, sync all E cores to 44, manual CPU voltage 1.346, multi core enhancement disabled, PL1 and PL2 both at 4095 max. I hit 94-95c in Cinebench R23 with a score of 40,578-40,680. Gaming in Battlefield 2042 at 60-75c maybe a spike to 80c. Using Thermalright contact frame and Arctic LF II 420mm AIO.

I enabled undervolting through bios and had some more improved results. Still hot, but slightly better performance. The CPU is a 13900k monster being paired with a double fan radiator — that's the core problem for prebuilts.

It's an inefficient chip... as configured. The Raptor Lake architecture is very efficient when configured to run in its most efficient clock/voltage ranges, and a power guzzling monster when pushed beyond that curve.

I have a rig with a 13900k that has been unstable as hell. Sometimes, it crashes in game or sometimes it will just freeze when I'm browsing chrome. Updated to the latest bios and have applied the new Intel default performance and extreme configuration but still saw crashes. I ended up swapping it out for a 12900k for stability purposes. This sucks because LGA1700 is a dead socket too. Will probably build a new rig in 4 years and will go AMD CPU.

I went from a i5 10th gen with DDR4 SSD to a i9 13900 with DDR5 and M.2 drives and the performance difference for some things is amazing. Songs running 70% CPU are now at 10% CPU.

I use it on my work machine. It runs for hours on end at 100% across all cores running production work. Yeah it gets hot, but never an issue.

I got my 13900KF and it's been 100% good all the time. I've never had a crash I could remember in games and it's coming up 2 years.