The start of sales of the processor series “Raptor Lake” went well. All six starting models are immediately available slightly below their recommended prices.
Intel has officially introduced the Raptor Lake aka Core i-13000 series of CPUs for desktop PCs. The inventories at German dealers look good right from the start: anyone who is interested in one of the six models presented will get one immediately. Compared to AMD’s Ryzen 7000 CPUs, Intel’s mid-range in particular is more attractive from a price-performance point of view.
This is mainly due to the platform costs: The Core i5-13600KF is a few euros more expensive than the Ryzen 5 7600X, but it runs on significantly cheaper mainboards, optionally with DDR4 instead of DDR5 RAM. You can get good B660 mainboards for less than 150 euros, and 16 GB DDR4-3200 RAM for just under 55 euros. Together with the Core i5-13600KF, this results in around 560 euros.
High costs at AMD
The cheapest AM5 mainboards, on the other hand, only start at 220 euros, with higher demands on the range of functions the costs quickly rise to 300 euros and beyond – for example with PCI Express 5.0 support and a better sound chip than Realktek’s ALC897. The cheapest DDR5 kits with a capacity of 16 GB are available for 85 euros, but then with a low clock and high timings. Faster kits, for example with DDR5-5600 clock frequencies, cost at least 110 euros.
The cheapest configuration with the Ryzen 5 7600X and 16 GB of RAM ends up at around 660 euros, better equipped configurations quickly exceed 700 euros. AMD’s Ryzen 5 7600X and Intel’s Core i5-13600KF are within striking distance in games, the latter is faster in multi-core optimized applications thanks to its 8 efficiency cores (in addition to six performance cores).
Intel is only at a disadvantage when it comes to power consumption – according to the official specifications, the CPU can consume up to 181 watts. AMD has increased the power consumption of its new processor series so much that the Ryzen 5 7600X can consume up to 142 watts.
For even cheaper systems, Intel is expected to introduce further Raptor Lake models such as the Core i5-13600 in early 2023. At AMD, the grip remains on the Ryzen 5000 series with an AM4 mainboard
TechAint 