Raptor Lake Core i9-13900KF Overclocked to 6.2GHz With Liquid Chiller

Intel’s 13th generation Raptor Lake CPUs are allegedly about to launch, so sample versions have begun making their way into the hands of content creators. Whether this is officially sanctioned by Intel is unclear. However, a notable Chinese tech journalist has uploaded a new video showing some impressive overclocking results from the flagship Core i9-13900KF CPU. His video appeared on the Chinese social media site Bilibili, and the overclocked chip absolutely demolished the Core i9-12900K in benchmarks. The same goes for the 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X; it was a bloodbath.

The new benchmarks come from Extreme Player, whose tests we’ve highlighted before. Previously, he showed the Core i9-13990K running a dual-core boost clock of 5.8GHz. This time around, he has a Core i9-13900KF engineering sample. The KF variants are typically the same as the unlocked “K” CPUs but do not include an integrated GPU. He was running the CPU on an Asus ROG Maximus Apex Z690 motherboard. As a refresher, the Core i9-13900K is the top-shelf CPU for Raptor Lake. It’ll offer eight hyper-threaded P-cores and 16 E-cores for a total of 24 cores and 32 threads. It has a base clock of 3GHz, a maximum boost clock of 5.8GHz across two cores, and an all-core boost clock of 5.5GHz.

Extreme Player applied what sounds like exotic cooling to the chip, according to Wccftech. The site says he used a liquid-chilled all-in-one (AIO), and a Twitter summary describes it as a “water chiller OC.” Though some outlets are reporting this as “liquid cooling,” that’s misleading. If it’s using a chiller that means there are additional components to cool the liquid to sub-ambient temperatures. These coolers are both rare and expensive. However, they could help explain the impressive results from his tests. However, it also gives us insight into what Raptor Lake is capable of, even with an off-the-shelf liquid cooler.

Overall he was able to ratchet up the i9-13900K to 6.1GHz across all P-cores, with E-cores running at 4.7GHz. He also overclocked just the E-cores to 5.2GHz and saw an 18 percent multi-core performance boost from that alone. In this configuration, he was able to successfully run the CPU-Z benchmark. This just shows there is a lot of performance potential available by overclocking the efficiency cores.

Next, he tested Cinebench R23. This program will stress every CPU core and thread to 100 percent for the duration of the benchmark. Given the strenuous nature of the test, he had to be a bit more conservative with the clocks on this one. He ended up with all P-cores at 5.8GHz and E-cores at 4.7GHz. In Cinebench, the performance of this combo was 57 percent faster than that of the Core i9-12900K. It was also a whopping 77 percent faster than the 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X.

Extreme Player stated the P-cores were very stable at 5.8GHz for Cinebench, and at 6.2GHz for CPU-Z, according to Techspot. Given these results, it seems like Intel has given Raptor Lake a bit more headroom for overclocking than Alder Lake. However, it remains to be seen what kind of performance can be achieved with a less exotic cooling solution. Although, he also notes he was able to squeeze an extra 5,000 points in Cinebench with his chiller versus an air-cooler.

All in all, this is promising news for the overclocking performance of Intel’s upcoming CPUs, and that’s in addition to the previously reported “extreme performance mode.” However, it’s not clear if Extreme Player was using this mode for his tests. With that type of cooling setup, he should have been. Although, the “maximum power” mode is supposedly not available on 600-series motherboards, so it’s likely he was using the standard PL2 TDP of 253W. If so, that’s even more impressive.