Intel Raptor Lake leak shows a seriously fast CPU to worry AMD – except for one key detail

Intel’s Raptor Lake flagship CPU has been spotted in leaked benchmarks which show some seriously speedy multi-core performance, albeit at a cost in terms of the power usage that the Core i9-13900K guzzles.

This comes from OneRaichu (as flagged up by VideoCardz) on Twitter, a regular hardware leaker who has provided benchmarks drawn from Cinebench R23, although as always we should be skeptical about any such leakage and the possibility that it might be faked.

If true, this certainly shows the 13900K processor in an impressive light for performance, as it managed to hit 2,290 in single-core and 35,693 in multi-core. This was at default settings for clock speeds and power, with the CPU consuming 254W in the test – which is actually the rumored ‘PL2’ power limit of the 13900K (the max power usage when running flat out at top Turbo speeds).

OneRaichu notes that the 13900K was running at 5.8GHz on two performance cores, and 5.5GHz across the other six. VideoCardz also points out a further leak from ECSM that consists of an Aida 64 stability test, and this shows two cores hitting 5.8GHz with the others at 5.5GHz, too.

Back to OneRaichu’s leak, which gets more interesting as it also offers up a Cinebench run without any power limit settings for the CPU. While single-core wasn’t affected here, the multi-core result jumped much higher to 40,616, albeit that the CPU was chugging the best part of 100W more power to achieve this (the processor hit a peak of 345W).

As VideoCardz points out, this suggests that compared to the current 12900K, the incoming 13900K flagship will be around 30% faster for multi-core performance (and 48% faster with that unlimited power setting), and 48% faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X (67% with unlimited power). Although it’s worth noting that Intel’s 13th-gen will be facing off against the next-gen Ryzen 7950X, though.

Analysis: Underlining what we’ve already heard about Raptor Lake

That’s quite an eye-opening leap in performance, of course, but as we’ve already noted, we need to be very careful about leaks – and indeed reading too much into results drawn from a single benchmarking tool anyway.

In short, we should consider those percentages with a great deal of caution, particularly in the case of dropping the power limits for Cinebench R23 runs. Doing so requires a seriously beefy cooling solution, and while we don’t know what was used in the main spillage here, in the case of the ECSM (Aida 64) leak, we’re told a 360mm all-in-one liquid cooler was employed to keep temperatures at 90 degrees with a power usage of 314W (not too far off what was reached in the Cinebench testing with unlimited power).

All of this seems to back up recent speculation that we’re looking at boost speeds of around 5.8GHz for the flagship processor, and that Raptor Lake should be a bit easier to cool than Alder Lake. The latter will be good news for overclockers, of course, as they should be able to juice up Intel’s next-gen CPUs more while keeping thermals relatively reasonable.

That said, enthusiasts who want to push hard with a Raptor Lake flagship twinned with an RTX 4090 – with its rumored high power demands – could well have their work cut out in terms of keeping everything suitably cool and stable.

AMD’s incoming Zen 4 processors are also looking very promising performance-wise, with boost speeds rumored to be reaching similar levels to Raptor Lake – but in what might be a crucial twist, better power efficiency is expected from Ryzen 7000 silicon. Furthermore, there may be more stock of Zen 4 chips around on launch, or so the latest rumor reckons…