Intel 13900K & 13600K Temperature Myths BUSTED

well hello everybody this is going to be a really interesting video for me personally and I hope it's going to be for you too because the launch of Intel's 13th gen processors probably raised a lot more questions than it had answers for a lot of you guys because on the day it launched reviews typically fell into one of two categories either these processors were fire breathing monsters that sucked back a ton of electricity and were almost impossible to cool or the reviews like ours said these things they are still power hungry but they are a lot easier to cool than you might imagine that means that typical air cooling can keep something like the 13900k cool enough to reach optimal frequencies but which is right which is wrong is there even a middle ground to that that's what I wanted to find out in this video this isn't going to be your typical temperatures versus clock speeds video either or one of those sort of side notes that's shoved to the end of a video because I really wanted to go in depth and discuss how different cooling solutions from basic heatsinks to aios behave on Intel's 13th gen CPUs from the air cooler side there's the deepcool ak-400 which is a budget heatsink that goes for about 35 bucks these days there's also the ak620 which happens to be able to match the best of the best air coolers in most tests for aios I've Got Deep Cool's brand new high performance LT series and these are probably some of the best looking aios I've seen so far there's just the right amount of bling with this simple but oh so cool geometric pattern on the pump and the price is pretty sweet too at about 140 bucks for the 360 millimeter and 110 for the 240 millimeter design and for those of you keeping track at home that 240 millimeter that's pretty close to high-end air coolers these days too and at this point we may as well take a little bit of a breather I guess and talk about today's video sponsor Dimitri take it away buddy the all-new g360a by phantix bringing updated design inside and out to refresh the p360a chassis with a legendary breathable dual durable mesh front panel for improved Cooling and that awesome illumination peeking through via the 3D RGB front fans the interior is now made to accommodate 360 million radiators at the front and top longer GPU support and user-friendly assembly the dual color options are great for an all-wide build with complementing cooler fans and PSU so check out the new phantix g368 cases down below so let me start right off at the top by describing some of the crazy crazy behavior that we're starting to see on Intel's 13th gen CPUs it's so frustrating I'm telling you guys this is gonna be really me angry because we've been down this road over and over and over again and it keeps on coming up so I guess the first thing I have to talk about is Intel's power levels before Alder lake pl2 or power level 2 was the maximum allowable power for short durations usually used for bursts of higher clocks at the beginning of an all-core workload after that short PL 2 bursts the chip would fall to pl1 which is the long-term power limit as of Alder Lake and now Raptor Lake pl1 and pl2 are essentially the same if and only if your motherboard can handle it so the processor will strive to remain as close as possible to its maximum turbo power provided it's running cool enough anyways the maximum Turbo Power according to Intel for the 3900k and the 13700k is 253 Watts meanwhile the 13600k gets cut back a bit to 181 Watts now that seems pretty simple on paper right and on Intel's website but this is where we get into some dodgy ass motherboard business that's because many but not all boards push things even further than Intel's maximum Turbo Power right out of the box in their Auto settings without any user input why well to win or cheat or whatever you want to call it in comparative benchmarks Asus calls it multi-core enhancement or MCE on MSI it's enhanced turbo and gigabyte has enhanced multi-core performance and so on but regardless of what the feature is called it'll push wattage to the maximum allowed by Raptor Lake even if it's beyond Intel's own guidelines until it hits its t-junction which is 100 degrees Celsius thereafter it's gonna do one of two things either it's going to keep on going Balls to the absolute wall or it's going to back off the gas a little bit I wanted to actually give you a little bit of a snapshot of what that looks like with the z790 Maximus hero and a 360 millimeter AIO running at 100 fan speed in an all-core blender workload and during a 10 minute workload here's how the 3900k behaves when running at Intel's defaults it stries to hit 253 watts and since there's enough cooling capacity that's exactly what it does for the entire run some manufacturers Asus included have their Auto setting pegged the 13900 K to 300 watts and around 100 degrees Celsius for a predetermined period of time in this case it's 96 seconds and then dial down to the cpu's maximum Turbo Power of 253 Watts again it's sort of like a pl1 pl2 situation for Raptor Lake others just shoot for the moon and remove Intel's limits all together as their out of box default the hero has a setting which does that too but you physically have to select it unlike some other manufacturers where the auto setting behaves exactly like this and this is what running Without Limits does the motherboard does absolutely everything it possibly can to hit the absolute maximum CPU wattage which in this case is 300 watts the only thing that holds it back is you guessed it temperatures because the effect of running Without Limits on temperatures is pretty damn dramatic we're talking about running straight up to 100 degrees almost all the time that's a massive difference from running at Intel stock settings or even the Asus Auto profile that eventually Falls right back into line with Intel's default spec and look this is exactly why you're seeing so much talk about 300 watt fire breathing 13900ks it's not even sensationalizing per se because on some but not all motherboards this CPU will run hot and consume absolutely insane amounts of power while Intel allows this and caused their own specifications guidance or guidelines this is something that happened actually back in the z490 days and everybody and I mean everybody was critical of motherboards enabling MCE when they just come out of the box when you just pop a chip in there what has changed I have no idea one thing is certain though showing this kind of behavior it makes for an amazing thumbnail I'll give everybody that but there's one thing that you also really have to take into account here all that extra juice doesn't really affect overall clock speeds over longer periods of time while the Asus Auto setting will be amazing for bursty workloads like short benchmarks the final Delta between running at Intel's bone stock config and Without Limits at close to 300 watts on average is 150 megahertz yup that's about it all that power and heat for less than a three percent bump in frequencies so it's pretty simple isn't it if you are running one of those motherboards that runs your 3900k Without Limits out of the box or you set No Limits yourself you're obviously going to need one of these guys a 360 millimeter AIO running at close to 100 fast speed period point you can stop watching the video right now but what happens if your motherboard runs at Intel's defaults or falls into the same category as the Asus one here which goes all out for a little while but then settles down to the standard 253 watt Baseline in terms of raw temperatures at 50 fan speed all these cooler what do you know get hot even with the fans running full out over 90 degrees is pretty much par for the course for anything under a 360 millimeter all-in-one liquid cooler but after seeing the correlation between temperatures power and clock speeds before these readings don't really matter all that much since a cooler can be running hot but that doesn't mean it's running slow and the 3900 case frequencies prove that at half fan speed none of them Throttle Down to Intel's base clock yet there's some benefits to upsizing your cooler or running with high-speed fans when running on all core workload on this chip once everything is said and done the Delta between the best cooler here running all out and a basic heatsink like the ak-400 operating at a near silent fan profile is about 350 megahertz meanwhile looking at actual performance you can clearly see there's a lot of diminishing returns here even an air cooler like the ak-620 can get the chip running at almost Peak Performance while running super quiet increasing fan speed Narrows that Gap even more where there's only about 30 seconds separating the 360 millimeter AIO from the budget heatsink across a 14 plus minute render all this isn't to say that you should be cheaping out on a cooler when you're buying an ultra high-end processor like the 3900k absolutely not you should not be looking at cheaping out on basically anything if you're blocking down that kind of money for a CPU but what it does prove is that without all that motherboard Ridiculousness stepping in you can achieve Optimal Performance from the 13900k with a high-end air cooler but what about gaming because I know and you guys know that the vast majority of people who are looking for this processor are going to be using it probably for gaming not for all core rendering workloads because the vast majority of people who are doing those high level renders in Maya in blender have moved on to GPU you compute anyways and there's obviously a lot less power needed for gaming than a full core load so even with ultra quiet Acoustics the 3900k is a hell of a lot easier to cool boost RPM more and temperatures plunge even further the two aios though do show their strengths over air cooling yet there's a flip side to that coin because every single cooling solution here allows you to get the best possible performance when we run an average across six games so by this point I'm sure that some of you maybe a few of you are starting to reevaluate what the common narrative is about the 13 900k I mean look once you take those motherboard Shenanigans out of the equation it is still extremely hard to cool except in gaming to a certain extent and the amount of power that it consumes will probably make a fx9590 weep but it is a lot more manageable than you might have originally thought and what about the 13600k for the time being it's is the entry-level processor of Intel's 13th gen so it's bound to be popular but being more budget friendly comes with some strings attached too first and foremost it needs to be easier to cool than a flagship CPU because the last thing I want is to spend a small fortune trying to tame a 330 dollar processor so let's set the stage to see how it behaves Without Limits at asus's Auto limits and at Intel's defaults well isn't this interesting at every single setting the power consumption stayed exactly the same in this all core blender load it just sticks to an average of 135 Watts not Intel's maximum Turbo Power of 181. let's dive a bit deeper to see exactly what's happening first of all it's pretty obvious the 360 millimeter AIO keeps the 13600k cool enough I mean it doesn't go above a peak of 67 degrees even in the worst case and this is exactly why nothing's moving this chip was able to hit maximum frequencies with without needing Intel's 180 watt maximum Turbo Power and it did it with temperature Headroom to spare that's the trifecta for Raptor Lake folks to break that down just a little bit more rather than looking at averages Intel lists the maximum turbo frequency here as 5.1 gigahertz on the p-cores and 3.9 on the e-cores now that is exactly exactly what we got even though this chip has 54 Watts technically of additional Headroom it will not go one iota above that without manual overclocking this is completely intentional too since the last thing Intel wants is for the 13600k to potentially compete against a more expensive 13th gen CPU meanwhile the 13900k can swing for the fences with its unique thermal velocity boost and turbo boost max 3.0 Technologies but what we saw just now was the lt720 360 millimeter AIO running at 100 fan speed so that is the best of the best situation outside of I guess a custom Loop that you would see on the 13600k but what happens if you just link that with more affordable air Cooling and water cooling solutions well with fans running at half speed everything here gets decent numbers even the entry level ak-400 turn things up a notch and temperatures of course go lower but does the 20 degree Delta between the coolest running heatsink and the hottest one actually make a difference the answer is nope not one bit because even when running at 85 Degrees the 13600k can still hit its maximum turbo frequencies so 5.1 gigahertz on the P cores and 3.9 on the e-cores for an average of 4.8 across all cores even in a workload like this of course that also leads to Performance being identical regardless of the cooling solution too I just need to emphasize again though make sure you get the best cooler you can afford even if it's a less expensive air cooler because as far as entry level air air coolers go the ak-400 so this guy right here is one of the better ones on the market so it might give some people and I'm talking to you whoever you're going to be a little bit of overconfidence that you can completely cheap out on an air cooling solution when it comes to cooling the 13600k and it really is not okay but anyways I wanted to move on to gaming here and I'm going to go through this really really quickly since power input is so low the amount of heat being produced is less too so pretty much any decent cooler yes even small form factor heatsinks will be more than enough to keep the 13600k cool during gaming workloads of course there might be some edge cases out there but overall every single one of these coolers in this video from a 360 millimeter AIO to the ak-400 was able to deliver low temperatures and identical gaming performance and that's good news for anyone who might be worried after seeing some of those far out 3 900 K results and that's pretty much it and I'll be completely honest with you unlike a lot of times I don't really have much to add to this conclusion because I think the numbers speak for themselves it's pretty obvious if you are running an intensive all core workload all day every day the 13900k even operating at Intel's limits will require a beefy cooling solution in order for it to hit Optimal Performance but it's nowhere near as bad as some people make it out to be especially in gaming you just need to understand that out of box results will vary in a massive way from one motherboard to another since some of them run the chip outside of Intel specifications on the other hand the 13600k is infinitely easier to cool even a good entry-level heatsink will have the chip running at its best so I guess that's it for this video I really hope that you enjoyed this one at the very least I hope it cleared up a little bit of the confusion surrounding these new chips from Intel I know that a lot of you said to me when I did it for the rise 7000 series it really helped I guess take away some of the fears about cooling those chips and maybe added a few more anyways I'm Mike with Hardware Canucks and I will see you in the next one have a good day guys

Channel: Hardware Canucks

Views: 184,964

Keywords: 13900k, 13600k, i5 13600k, 13900k air cooling, 13600k air cooling, 13900k cooling, 13900k cpu cooler, intel 13900k, i9 13900k, intel i9 13th gen 13900k, 13900k benchmark, 13900k benchmarks, intel i9 13900k, intel 13600k, intel i5 13600k, 13900k temperature, 13900k aio cooler, hardwarecanucks, hardware canucks

Id: dNFgswzTvyc

Length: 16min 12sec (972 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/showmeagoodtimejack]

why is nobody making content with the i7?

[u/notice_me_senpai-]

Both AMD & Intel new gen got shipped 50-100w above their efficiency point to get ~5-10 extra percent in most cases.

Get them down to 125w, you'll see no change in gaming, some limited loss in productivity and double digit reduction in temperature.

[u/arrismultidvd]

Without ambient temperature, it's not applicable to everyone. I've experienced 20 C difference when doing heavy processing using my hot as fuck intel powered macbook pro back in the days, going from inside a room with 20-22 C ambient to a room with 28-30 C ambient. Mind you this is still in the same place, just a different room.

Sometimes it can give you false hope when looking at these temperature results :(