Intel i9-13900K review shows Raptor Lake reach 100°C even with 360 AIO, gobbling 420W

An early review for Intel's upcoming 13th Gen Raptor Lake-S flagship, the Core i9-13900K has seemingly been published and the power consumption and temperature numbers are on the higher side.

While running the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) stress test, the PL4 (Power Limit 4) figures apparently reach 420W of power draw. The temperature during this stress test was equally bad as it reached 100°C even with a 360mm AIO cooler. Expectedly, XTU indicates that the chip was thermal throttling.

While the power consumption and temperatures don't instill much confidence, the performance of the CPU looks pretty good. In heavily multithreaded situations, there is around a 40% improvement in the throughput in Raptor Lake-S compared to 12th Gen Alder Lake-S i9-12900KF. In some scenarios, the lead extends up to 50%. In terms of single-threaded improvement, there is around a 10% gain.

You can view the performance comparison numbers in the images below. They paint a similar picture to the early official review by SiSoftware Sandra that tested the locked Core i9-13900 variant.

This hefty uptick in multi-threaded performance is thanks to the additional eight E-cores that Raptor Lake has compared to Alder Lake, alongside general instructions per cycle (IPC) improvements. Compared to Alder Lake-S' 16 cores 24 threads, Raptor Lake-S packs 24 cores and 32 threads.

Source and images: ExtremePlayer (bilibili) via HXL (Twitter)