This week, Intel will hold an event in Israel to unveil their future Raptor Lake CPUs, also known as 13th Generation Intel Core CPUs. While numerous leaks had previously indicated Raptor Lake’s overclocking potential, Intel has officially confirmed the absolute max at 6GHz. What you’re describing reminds us of the unannounced Intel Core i9-139000KS. In comparison, its major competitor, AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X, has a boost clock of 5.7GHz.
Tom’s Hardware reports on this historic CPU clocking achievement, which was apparently accomplished without any exceptional cooling. It photographed Intel’s “history of being 1st & solving huge problems” timeline. The final slide boasts, “1st 6GHz/8GHz OC WR.” OC WR stands for “overclocking world record.” Raptor Lake has recently reached 8GHz on liquid nitrogen.
According to Wccftech, this is the first time Intel silicon has reached that frequency in over a decade, so it’s pretty significant. The 6GHz component is likely to be a standard Raptor Lake, but we can’t be sure. As with the i9-12900KS, it will almost certainly be a binned SKU. Two of the eight performance cores on that Alder Lake CPU reached 5.5GHz.
Last week, Intel’s Raptor Lake sales slides were leaked, and the frequency 6GHz was not mentioned once. Therefore, we can safely assume it will be similar to the 12900KS, which debuted nine months after the initial Alder Lake CPUs.
At the same time, it was Intel’s response to AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which had been available for purchase for two months. Both CPUs fought it out for the title of “fastest gaming CPU,” but AMD’s chip was significantly cheaper. Intel might follow the same strategy with Raptor Lake, waiting for AMD to release its V-Cache Zen 4 CPUs before responding with a KS flagship.
If achievable, reaching 6GHz in the air is an impressive feat. In the past, one overclocker could get a Core i9-13900KF up to 6.2GHz, but only with a costly liquid chiller. It would be remarkable if Intel could achieve such speeds wirelessly or with a standard AIO. It is also unclear if the increased 6GHz speed will work with the stock 253W power envelope or if an “extreme performance mode”-capable motherboard will be required.
Raptor Lake appears to be an improvement over Alder Lake as well. A “refinement” of a process does not necessarily result in the standard 10–20% increase in output. Raptor Lake, Intel claimed during the conference, will provide a SPECintrate 2017 single-core improvement of 15% and a multi-core increase of 41%. Intel claimed that Raptor Lake would offer “40 percent performance scaling” over Alder Lake, albeit this is a narrow benchmark.
More information will be released this week after the corporation finishes briefing the media under NDA. Later this month, Raptor Lake will be released to the public. We’ve seen the specs, but there’s been no word on pricing or release dates.
There is also a lack of information regarding the types of motherboards sold and their respective prices. While DDR4 support is planned for Raptor Lake, it is unknown whether or not this will make it to Z790 or stay with the 600-series boards. With DDR5’s shown 20% performance improvement over DDR4, many would-be upgraders may be enticed to make the transition.
Even more so, costs have dropped considerably since Alder Lake first went on sale. Since AMD’s Zen 4 will only support DDR5, and Intel’s 14th-gen Meteor Lake has already been revealed to only support DDR5, it’s best to get some now. Prices aren’t crazy right now, and they’ll be considerably more reasonable next year if you can wait.