Could Intel's new Core i5 13600K be the mid-range champion? Specs, prices, DDR5 RAM, and more

Intel made their Core i5 13600K processor official at the Innovation event last night. The chip is going head-to-head with AMD's Ryzen 5 7600X this season. While AMD focuses on improving IPC and single-core performance metrics, Intel's lead lies in increasing core count and improving multi-core metrics via a larger number of efficiency cores.

Both the Core i5 13600K and the Ryzen 5 7600X have been priced similarly. While the former will go for $330, the six-core 7600X will cost users $299. Intel also sells a -KF variant of the Core i5, which is priced at $310. Intel, however, has significantly hiked processor prices with 13th Gen Raptor Lake.

Thus, among the new $300 chips launching this generation, which one should gamers bet their money on is an important question. AMD chips are already available and Intel has given us a launch date of October 20.

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Which among Core i5 13600K and Ryzen 5 7600X is a better option for gaming?

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger introduces the Raptor Lake Core i9 (Image via Intel)

The official benchmarks of the Core i5 13600K have not been revealed yet. In the Intel Innovation event, the company's officials primarily focused on the flagship Core i9 13900K processor.

However, sufficient data, including the official product page of the processor, has gone online, which gives us a hint at what to expect from this chip.

Every Raptor Lake processor, including the performance-focused Core i5 has gotten a significant boost in the Efficiency core count. The new processor has four more E cores and threads as compared to the last gen. This makes for a total of 14 cores (6P + 8E) on the Intel chip.

To add to this, every chip now scales beyond the 5 GHz mark. The new Core i5 13600K boosts up to 5.10 GHz. However, base clocks have been nuked and the processor now has a base frequency of 3.50 GHz.

Efficiency core clocks in the Raptor Lake offerings are also important as the multi-core performance of these chips largely depends on these low-power components. The core clocks on these cores have been boosted by a significant margin. The advertised base clocks are 2.60 GHz and can turbo up to 3.90 GHz.

Commenting on the frequency gains of the Raptor Lake CPUs, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said that it was only yesterday that he saw Intel introduce a chip with 1 GHz clock speeds.

Intel Raptor Lake will have over 50 processors (Image via Intel)

Like every other Raptor Lake CPU, the new Core i5 13600K processor has seen a bump in the total L2 and L3 cache. This chip has a total of 24 MB of Intel Smart Cache.

The base power is 125 W, the same as the last-gen equivalent. However, Intel chips are infamous for hitting much higher power limits if they have sufficient headroom. The advertised turbo power for the 13600K is 181 W. This makes the new processor a tad less power efficient as compared to the 12600K.

The new processor is also getting a massive bump in memory support. The 13600K supports up to DDR5 5600 MT/s memory, up from AMD's DDR5 5200 MT/s upper limit. DDR4 memory frequency support remains unaltered at 3200 MT/s.

Intel has paired the Core i5 13600K with the best iGPU from last-gen, UHD Graphics 770. Only the Core i9 12900K sports this graphics processor. With a base clock of 300 MHz and a boost frequency of 1.50 GHz, this IGPU can easily handle some competitive titles at 1080p.

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On paper, the Core i5 13600K looks like a solid processor. It will be sold for $320. Although leaked benchmarks have given us a glimpse at the performance levels, a conclusive remark can only be made when the official benchmarks roll out next month.