Gaming benchmarks: Intel Core i5-13600K with DDR5 and DDR4 compared

Extensive testing of the Core i9-13900K, Core i7-13700K, and Core i5-13600K on Thursday shed light on many aspects of the new Raptor Lake generation, but not yet one: gaming performance in combination with DDR4, which the new CPUs keep supporting. This will now ship for the Core i5-13600K.

Raptor Lake still supports DDR4

Intel Raptor Lake, also known as 13th Generation Core, like Alder Lake, also known as 12th Generation Core, is based on motherboards with socket LGA 1700. The new K-CPUs can be installed on existing motherboards with a Z690 or B660 chipset or one of the new ones with a Z790 chipset, which are available with both DDR4 and DDR5 memory slots.

For cost reasons, many 12th generation customers have opted for motherboards with DDR4 memory instead of DDR5 or want to do so when they step foot on Raptor Lake. This is particularly useful in combination with the “budget” Core i5-13600K for 410 euros RRP. But how big is the performance loss? The answer to the question was still missing on Thursday’s test.

Core i5-13600K tested with DDR4

Meanwhile, ComputerBase also tested the Core i5-13600K with DDR4-3200CL14 (officially the maximum for DDR4) and DDR4-3600CL14 in the course of gaming testing as an alternative to DDR5-5600CL32. It now also competes in the benchmark course with memory parity with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. That came as a motherboard. Asus ROG Z690-A Gaming D4 with the current 2103 BIOS.

In the course of editors’ testing at the maximum CPU limit (720p, max details, DLSS/FSR/downscaling if possible), the Core i5-13600K loses an average of 6 percent in FPS and frame times when switching from DDR5-5600CL32 to DDR4 -3200CL14. In terms of FPS, it falls behind the identically equipped Ryzen 7 5800X3D, but remains slightly ahead in terms of frame times. With a DDR4-3600CL14 instead of a DDR5-5600CL32, the performance drop is less than 2%.

A look at the individual games shows that it depends on the game whether DDR4-3200CL14, DDR4-3600CL14 or DDR5-5600CL32 make any difference. In addition to games that barely show any effect, there are also titles where DDR4-3200CL14 is almost double digits behind, but on the other hand there are also games where DDR4-3600CL14 is ahead of DDR5-5600CL32.

More landmarks planned

The publishers plan to add more skins to the Raptor Lake vs. Ryzen 7000/5000 in the future. For example, the Core i5-13600K has yet to be tested at different TDP levels, and benchmarks of Ryzen CPUs with higher RAM clock speeds are worth considering.