Rumor: Intel Core i9-13900K gets ‘extreme performance mode’ with 350W-tdp

Unlike the 12900K, the Core i9-13900K will not have enough of its standard ‘maximum turbo power’ of about 250W. This is reported by the Hungarian hardware site Prohardver. When unlocking the power limits, the consumption of the i9 would increase to 350W.

With the twelfth generation Core processors, Intel introduced the terms “base processor power” and “maximum turbo power” as a successor to the PL1 and PL2 limits. With the overclockable models with the K suffix, the mtp may be consumed continuously. With the Core i9-12900K, it was 241W, just enough to maintain the all-core boost of 4.9GHz. According to Prohardver with the i9-13900K, that will no longer be sufficient, meaning that the maximum all-core boost is only achieved when deactivating the default limits.

According to previous rumors, the i9-13900K will receive an all-core turbo of 5.5GHz for the P-cores. In addition, the processor also has twice as many E-cores as the i9-12900K. A significantly higher maximum power consumption was therefore in line with expectations. With a load limited to a few cores, the processor could boost even higher, up to 5.8GHz.

Tests of a qualification sample of a Core i9-13900K with power limits disabled. To keep the all-core turbo of 5.5GHz, the processor consumes almost 350W. Source: @OneRaichu

Some high-end motherboards in the new 700 series will have a built-in mode to increase the power limit to 350W, which Prohardver calls the ‘extreme performance mode’. In this mode, the processor can retain its full all-core turbo, which would allow up to 15 percent better performance in multithreaded workloads. Of course, good cooling is required for this.

The Raptor Lake processors, as the codename of the thirteenth generation Core CPUs is, will also remain compatible with the existing 600 series motherboards. However, with such a motherboard, you will have to manually disable the limits to get the i9-13900K to perform at its maximum. The required bios option usually has a name along the lines of ‘Remove all limits’.

Intel plans to announce the Raptor Lake CPUs on September 28, followed by a release the week of October 17. In our AMD Ryzen 7000 vs. Intel Raptor Lake preview this weekend, we went into great detail about what to expect from the new generations of processors.