13900k with power limit vs 13600k?

User Support Hub Hardware & Peripherals
1

I’m going to upgrade my system and planning on a 13900k. Also a new board and new RAM.
I know that the 13900 is a heat/power beast, so I would set a power limit at about 200W or even less. (I know, undervolting is probably more efficient, but I don’t want to go there, maybe later.)

My question is, how would a 13900 at 200W or less compare to a 13600?
The reason why I don’t want a 13600 straight away, is that a “downgraded” 13900 to 13600 range still has the advantage of way more cores/threads and more L2 and L3 cache.

Is MSFS going to benefit of those advantages?

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So, no opinion on how a 13900 @ roughly 13600 speeds would perform because of more cache and more cores?

3

I don’t understand the logic of buying an 13900K if you are not going to use it’s full capacity. So long as you have an adequate power supply and proper cooling, why not just let it run.

4

As presently having a 9900K, I am having the same thoughts.

I’m going to upgrade to a 13900K, 13700K,12900K, 12700K and considering the issue of power usage of each CPU.

I don’t really need the capability of the 900s and will probably go with the 700.
The 700s are said to be perfect for non creative use.
But, these sources are for non game (FS2020) use.

But I do want it for FS2020 primarily. (Office and Chrome and Forums and Discords)

But, like you, I also would like to understand how much the additional cores & cache will affect performance in FS2020.

5

What do you care about here? Heat as in cooling insufficiency, or power draw as in electric bills? Or are you worried about CPU lifetime? If so, don’t; you can’t break this chip or kill it early just by running it at its stock turbo speeds or a bit higher. Short of dangerously overvolting it, or running it without a cooler, I don’t see any way you can kill it at all.

The 13900K is a hot chip. Everyone acknowledges this. I run mine with an AIO cooler with 280mm rad and in heavy use for MSFS, my CPU temps are around 65-75C most of the time, but if I push it all-out with a stress test, I get multiple cores reaching 90C+ and have almost immediate thermal throttling of around 8-12%. You can’t really run a 13900K all-core max and not throttle it without ‘exotic’ cooling. But the sim never pushes it that hard, it doesn’t have enough threads and it’s bottlenecked on things just like any real software. As a load, it’s heavy but it’s not unreasonable. Honestly, I haven’t had any real problems with mine except for the giant amount of heat it kicks out, and in the winter that was kind-of handy :slight_smile:

In terms of power consumption, I don’t measure that and I don’t really care about it. My bill is high anyway because I run a PC and other hardware all day every day for work. The biggest saving I made was turning my thermostat down a couple of degrees!

On the question of more cores vs a 13600K, it’s nice to have more cores and more cache, but those only really show significant benefits when you’re pushing the chip hard, and for MSFS, it will use as many cores at it uses which will not be all of them.

The 13900K was designed to run at 5.8GHz turbo for extended periods and to draw the power, and kick out the heat, that it does. Like other posters here, I think you’d be doing yourself a disservice to spend the money on the thing and then not get its full performance.

I would buy the CPU that will deliver the performance you want at its normal operating power and temps, and if the 13600K works for you in that department, go for it. Spending the extra on the 13900K can only really be justified if you’re going to use that power. Or at least, that’s my £0.02.

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Because I’m looking for the best compromise between heat/noise emission and performance.
And a 13900k has more cores and cache but could still be at the noise/heat level of a 13600. I don’t care much about the price difference, since I’m going to build a new system anyways.

7

As previously said, it’s mainly about heat/noise emission.
I’m going to use a CPU fan, not water. So, the 13900k is definitely not going to run at it’s full power anyways.

I try to make the question as simple as possible.
13900k vs 13600k, both set to a power limit of let’s say 125W. Would the 13900k still perform better in MSFS because of more cores and bigger cache?
Or maybe even perform worse, because at the same power limit the 13900 may even clock lower because it needs to spread the available power over more cores?

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I run an 13700K on air at 5,5 mhz
top perf!!

9

Thanks for the input.

Very interesting.

I’ll stick with the 12700K unless I discover that there is a reason
to go to the 13700K.

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I can’t find anyone who’s done this sort of comparison online. There was a comparison between the 13900K and Ryzen 9 7950X with both limited to 125W and then 65W, and the 13900K beat the Ryzen quite healthily in benchmarks (Intel Core i9-13900K vs. AMD Ryzen 9 7950X at 125W and 65W | Club386). But benchmarks don’t accurately reflect real world performance in software like MSFS.

My gut feel is that at such an aggressive power limit, the difference between the two chips would be marginal. Cache and core count matter, but probably not as much as boost clock speed. But I would not pretend to be a CPU performance expert, and really the only way I think you could resolve this question would be to test both CPUs, and that’s not practical.

I think I, personally, in your specific use case, would go for the 13600K, since I could run it much closer to its design limits while keeping the heat and noise lower.

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11

I’ve found a test where they compared the 13900k @ 125W and 88W:

Most of the time, the 13900k @ 88W still performed similar or even better compared to the 13600k.
Unfortunately the didn’t include MSFS.
I would guess that a 13900k @ 125W would still be better in terms of noise/heat compared to the 13600k, which runs default at about max 180W.

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12

Thanks.
I’ll change my choice for a new CPU to 13900K.
I should go for the 13700K.

I’ll pair it with the new Intel Battlemage GPU next spring, 1Q 2024.