The fastest processor ever, and the fastest for gaming at this point, will cost you $700 before tax
AMD announced at CES 2023 its advanced X3D models in the desktop Ryzen 7000 series, which plan to use the addition of tens of megabytes to their shared cache memory to challenge Intel’s principle leadership in gaming applications and other applications for home users within its new Raptor Lake family – but before they get their chance to prove themselves, they get a new and tougher competitor in the form of the Core i9-13900KS, which is officially launched after quite a while when we knew about its existence unofficially.
The Core i9-13900KS jumps the base frequency and the maximum possible turbo frequency (in the P cores) of the Core i9-13900K by 200MHz and thus reaches a declared maximum frequency of 6GHz, which has never been available in a standard home processor without the need for manual overclocking From the user’s side, along with all the same other characteristics such as 24 physical processing cores, 36MB of L3 cache memory and a built-in UHD Graphics 770 graphics core.
The price of this small addition is about $110, between the official launch price of $590 for the Core i9-13900K and the official recommended price of $700 for the Core i9-13900KS – and an additional indirect price in the power envelope and expected power consumption , where the base shell of the fresh model is 150 watts instead of 125 watts in its brother, while the maximum turbo shell apparently remains 253 watts as before, although there is now another extreme setting that increases the same shell to 320 watts (and apparently intended to allow the Core i9-13900KS to maintain the 6GHz frequency for a slightly longer period of time).
The Core i9-13900KS is already available for purchase in the Newegg online store, including free shipping to Israel, at an increased base price equivalent to approximately $777 and a final price of approximately $912 when VAT is added – or NIS 3,116, while at the same time it appears that there is Several local hardware stores are already displaying it on their website, at prices starting at approximately NIS 3,260, an increase of about 23 percent to the minimum local price for the Core i9-13900K, in its Box edition.
First tests verify that the Core i9-13900KS is the ultimate model for gaming at the moment, especially when it is combined with advanced and fast DDR5 memories – although it seems that the differences compared to recent intermediate models such as the Ryzen 7 7700X or the Core i7- 13700K amounts to less than 10 percent, for a modest 1080p resolution designed to help highlight the difference compared to higher resolutions where the bottleneck will often be in the processing capabilities of the graphics card (while the differences in results between the various processors will be even more minimal, to the point of negligible statistical error) .
When the octagon Ryzen 7 7700X in question sells for less than half the price of the same Core i9-13900KS, it’s quite difficult to crown it as the new king of the market without the addition of a large and prominent asterisk – but nevertheless Intel still deserves credit for the beautiful technological achievement based on an old manufacturing process and a seller who has known many troubles and problems throughout its life cycle, as well as the fact that it slightly reduced the price gap compared to the previous Alder Lake generation, in which the Core i9-12900KS (with a maximum frequency of 5.5GHz “only”) was presented with a recommended price of 740 dollars.
So what do we do in 2023? Running to build your dream system with the Core i9-13900KS or continuing to wait patiently for the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 7 7800X3D? Feel free to share your opinion in the comments.