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GPUs and CPUs · Intel Core i9

Intel Core i9 13900K

7owners with an opinion
40%of verdicts positive
1/2positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance; criticized for noise and reliability.

What people wrote

Doesn’t like it
This is not that sort of workstation. My first software job was at a place doing municipal architecture. The modelers had and needed high end GPUs in addition to the render farm, but plenty of roles at the company simply needed anything with better than what the Intel integrated graphics of the time could produce in order to open the large detailed models. In these roles the types of work would include things like seeing where every pipe, wire, and plenum for a specific utility or service was in order to plan work between a central plant and a specific room. Stuff like that doesn’t need high amounts of VRAM since streaming textures in worked fine. A little lag never hurt anyone here as the software would simply drop detail until it caught up. Everything was pre-rendered so it didn’t need large amounts of power to display things. What did matter was having the grunt to handle a lot of content and do it across three to six displays. Today I’m guessing the integrated chips could handle it fine but even my 13900K’s GPU only does DisplayPort 1.4 and up to only three displays on my motherboard. It should do four but it’s up to the ODMs at that point. For a while Matrox owned a great big slice of this space but eventually everyone fell to the wayside except NVidia and AMD.
Neutral
Do you know which BIOS/microcode you were running before updating to 0x129? Multicore workload should never hit anywhere near 1.55V which is the cap from 0x129, and 13700K should be capable of doing 5.4GHz at 1.3V even with the worst bin, so it's a bit strange to see this 20% performance hit on CB. If this is compared to = 0x125 BIOS usually bumped this up/lower this down to Intel's recommendation. It could be very possible that AC_LL is setting too high on the MSI board after the fix. It's still very strange though, even if AC_LL is the culprit, that 253W is running 20% slower than 125W. For what it's worth, I have two systems running 13900K and 13700K both with ASRock board, and I see no difference in MT performance with 1-2% drop in ST (though 13700K is running with PL1=PL2=125W, but that shouldn't affect ST).
Doesn’t like it
I got one of the faulty 13900k, at least in my case I can confirm that the fault appeared using the default settings for pl1/pl2. I was doing reinforcement learning on that system and it was always crashing, I spent quite a bit of time trying to find the problem, swapped the CPU for a 13700kf I was using in another PC, the problem was solved. So I contact Intel to start the RMA process, Intel said that the MSI motherboard I was using doesn't support Linux, I emailed them the official Intel GitHub repo with the microcode that enables the support, they switched agents at that point but I was clear to me at that moment that Intel was trying their best to avoid the RMA, luckily I live in Europe, so I contacted my local consumer protection agency and did the RMA through them, in the meanwhile I saw a good offer for a 7950x + motherboard in an online retailer, bought it and sold in the second market my old motherboard and the RMA 13900k when I got it. Not buying Intel ever again, I was using Intel because they sponsor some projects in DS but damn.
Likes it
Yes and no. If you expressed interest in learning to program and were handed a book on x86 assembly language, most people would call that a waste of time. Even if you succeed at learning x86 as your first language, the knowledge will not be especially useful when employers are looking for fluency in modern C++ or Rust or whatever. It never hurts to have a solid grasp of the low-level fundamentals, of course, but it's not the name of the game. Not anymore. The way I think of it is, all current programming languages are now assembly languages. Coding will not go away -- not by any means -- but the job will be utterly unrecognizable in ten to fifteen years. And it's about fucking time. I just picked up a new 13900k / RTX4090 box the other day at the local white-box builder. I was telling my partner how cool it was that it could do almost a trillion calculations per second on the CPU, and maybe 40x that on the graphics card. "How does that compare to the big mainframes from the late 60s?" she asked. "About ten million times faster. But I still program the same way those guys did, using almost the same language and tools. How weird is that?"