i9-13900K vs future i9-14900K

I'm considering whether to buy a new machine in 6-8 weeks with the i9-13900K which got me to looking up info ("rumors") about the next generation.

The guess is that the 14th gen will be out Q4-23 or Q1-24. It is expected to be faster but nobody has anything to back that up with except Intel's track record. Expected to run cool. Will have a brand new socket. Will have 2 less P cores. Will have on-chip AI support.

There is some speculation that the 2 extra P cores in gen 13 may make that chip faster in some scenarios than the gen 14. (?)

A year is a long time to put off a purchase.

Windows 11 was released after a majority of hardware in the wild supported it. I suspect the 14th gen to have some security stuff in it that will usher in Windows 12 at some point.

I'm interested in AI and wonder how long it will be before any software is out there that takes advantage of the gen 14 AI support.

Cooler is better.

Requires new mother boards (and support chips?). That's a lot of "new" stuff that hasn't been fully tested yet.

Will be more expensive but probably not by much. Though new mother board designs may add to the cost as well.

Undoubtedly there will be a rush of buyers when it hits the streets.

So, that's all the pros/cons I can think of. Did I miss anything?

While we're on the subject...

Digital Storm is now offering the i9-13900KS chip for $56 more with higher clock speeds but runs hotter. Yay speed, boo heat. DS sells their systems with a three fan liquid cooling system. Should I even worry about the heat? Or just go for the extra cycles, seeing as how $56 is trivial in relationship to the whole build.

Thanks for your insights.

The current CHIP heat can be controlled. if you need it now why wait for next gen.

Even i7-11700 can run hot if it does not have correct cooling , Mine ran at 100C until I added a Noctua Tower cooler and and extra fans.

as for AI , Skynet here we come. LOL

AI in an instruction, LOL. Marketing people.

The 15th gen will be even more amazing, why don't you wait for that. It will have Intel Inside!

Morris

I am running the I7-13700K and have not encountered any photo or video app that causes it to run hot, including all the Topaz AI photo and video apps, the PS neural filters and Adobe Premiere. I am using the H150i ELITE CAPELLIX Liquid CPU Cooler with 3 fans and 340mm radiator and 4 case fans. In a test:

During the benchmark test, the Intel i9-13900K stayed ahead of the Intel i7-13700K with an average of ~5.8% lead. Consequently, the Intel i7-13700K is a more efficient chipset than the Intel i9-13900K, as it consumed about 20.1% less power and stayed about 11.3% cooler on average.

So you gain 5.8% performance by moving to the I9 at the expense of 11.3% more heat.

The 16 cores provide excellent performance for all the photo and video apps I run.

Since the 13th generation just shipped a couple months ago, it's a long wait for the 14th generation (these are generally on one year cycles). If you have use for a new system now, build/buy it now. The next generation will always be a bit faster, sometimes consuming more power, sometimes less - you won't really know that until the chip is actually out in the wild and being tested.

As for AI support in the CPU, it's a bit hard to know what that means. Lots of apps (like Lightroom) use the GPU to power their AI calculations. Perhaps they just mean that the integrated GPU will have a next round of improvements. But, if you're building a top-end system, I would assume you're going to put an external GPU in your system anyway and that's where you'll get your AI support from.

FYI, I just built two air-cooled systems with 13th generation chips in them for family members, one an i5-13600K (for light gaming) and one an 17-13700k (for Blender and graphics design work). Both are awesome systems and they are a lot faster than my 3 year old i7-9700k, but for the photography work I do, my i7-9700k is more than enough and still feels quite zippy.

Aside from the pure CPU speed, we're seeing a transition from DDR4 memory to DDR5. In today's 13th gen Intel systems, you can run either (you have to buy a motherboard specifically for one or the other, but the CPU will support either). DDR5 is still in its infancy. For most real world operations, it is barely faster (though more expensive), but as it continues to get developed, it will likely make a much bigger difference in the future. I chose to build both my new systems with DDR4 (better bang for the buck), but I expect that at some point in the near future, everything will move to DDR5.

We're also seeing a transition to PCIE5. Today's 13th gen Intel CPUs support 16 lanes of PCIE5 which is generally used by the graphics card and 4 lanes of PCIE4 which is usually used for an M.2 boot card. The rest of the PCIE lanes for other PCIE slots and for more M.2 drives come from the associated chipset and are PCIE4 or PCIE3. It is expected that 14th gen chips with chipset will support more PCIE5 lanes which will probably usher in PCIE5 M.2 drives with an even faster top speed than what we have today. I would assume these PCIE5 drives will initially be quite expensive.

And, for the i9, transition from 12th gen to 13th gen, Intel has been adding efficiency cores which improve the all-core speed. The single core speed was improved about 10% (which is typical from one generation to the next), but Intel also added 8 more efficiency cores which bumped the all-core speed a bigger amount. It's unclear if Intel will keep adding more cores. They probably can't add more P-cores because that would just create too much heat unless they had a dramatic breakthrough in efficiency.

I wouldn't worry about the fact that the next i9 will probably use a new CPU socket. Intel typically only stays with the same socket for two generations. I've always found that by the time I'm ready for a CPU upgrade, I always have to buy a new motherboard to go with the new CPU anyway. And, usually DRAM has advanced enough that you have to upgrade that too for the new motherboard. Now, for AMD, they tend to make their sockets last many more generations so you would be more likely to pop a new CPU into an older motherboard with AMD.

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John

There is always something new around the corner. Buy based on your needs of the options available at the time you need one.

If upgrades are part of your calculus, consider an AMD based system. Their new platform dropped legacy with a new socket and DDR5. You can expect that for the next generation or two the motherboard and RAM will be the same.

No one wants to hear: Outside of those who render video on a deadline no one "needs" uber CPUs to dawdle through PS/LR and its ilk, pausing to consider how far to nudge a slider in a lightly threaded program.

Computer hardware is obsolete before you buy it because Intel/AMD are always working on the next 3 generations in their road maps.

Just get what you can justify buying, whether you "need" it or not, when ready to buy because there is always something better in the pipeline.

"AI" enhancements, whatever those are--and whatever they are there are no software standards--are coming very soon to the Ryzen Mobile parts, but those are laptop parts. Then again Intel's latest, but also not yet released, uber mobile Raptor Lake part reportedly outdid a Threadripper on Cinebench. Which is really astounding and nearly irrelevant to image processing.

AMD is claiming they are the first to do AI enhancements in X86 but they were built into Intel 11th generation parts (just google it, there's still a page on the Intel website). They went nowhere, ate electricity and Intel went so far as to wall them off of the sections they were baked into in early12th generation parts.

I just upgraded my rig from a 12900K to a 13900KS. I was able to sell off the 12900K CPU quickly to significantly defray the cost of upgrading. The 12900K was no slouch with the P-Cores running @ 5GHz, but after the upgrade (which literally took me 10 minutes as the 12900's and 13900's are literally plug-compatible with the same motherboards), OMG! The speed difference is stark with several P-Cores hitting 6.3GHz stable using the ASUS automatic AI OC feature. I have a very heavily loaded system - I run multiple VMs, develop AI/ML knowledge graphs, gigapixel imaging, 8K video - pretty much anything and everything that can bring a rig to its knees.

Heat is no problem. I am using a Capella H150i CPU cooler which is the class of cooler needed. The bigger issue is that a good 1200W+ PSU is needed if using both a high-end CPU like the 13900KS and a 3090/4090-class GPU, though the power usage is small while idle and until the machine is under load.

Here's my build: https://pcpartpicker.com/b/tkwzK8

I am finally a happy camper; no need to upgrade to a 14900 series and will likely skip that generation entirely.

Mike

The new HEDT systems are supposedly/Allegedly right around the corner. Honestly if you need more than the current speed levels I'd lean that way.

Usually skipping generations lets you trade down and keep performance. That means a 14th I7 might be a better choice than a 13th I9 but you need to do without for a year.

edispics said:

I am running the I7-13700K and have not encountered any photo or video app that causes it to run hot, including all the Topaz AI photo and video apps, the PS neural filters and Adobe Premiere. I am using the H150i ELITE CAPELLIX Liquid CPU Cooler with 3 fans and 340mm radiator and 4 case fans. In a test:

During the benchmark test, the Intel i9-13900K stayed ahead of the Intel i7-13700K with an average of ~5.8% lead. Consequently, the Intel i7-13700K is a more efficient chipset than the Intel i9-13900K, as it consumed about 20.1% less power and stayed about 11.3% cooler on average.

So you gain 5.8% performance by moving to the I9 at the expense of 11.3% more heat.

The 16 cores provide excellent performance for all the photo and video apps I run.

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Hi,

I'm looking at the i7-13700K too but was planning to cool it with a Corsair iCUE H100i RGB ELITE 240mm. I'd like a ODD which requires a 5.25 slot in the top front of the casse which would eat into the space for a longer cooler. What do you think - would a 240mm cooler keep that CPU cool enough? I don't do video, don't play games, only interest in phot editing, a bit of CAD drafting, programing, etc. (and reading sites like DPReview).

Peter

Obviously you should wait for the 15900K. That will be even better.

Like Michael below I went with the 150i. Although heat has not been an issue and a smaller radiator MIGHT be ok, I'd rather give up on the internal ODD and get better cooling. I just bought an external ODD and I actually prefer it because of the placement flexibility it provides.

edispics said:

Like Michael below I went with the 150i. Although heat has not been an issue and a smaller radiator MIGHT be ok, I'd rather give up on the internal ODD and get better cooling. I just bought an external ODD and I actually prefer it because of the placement flexibility it provides.

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Yeah, I am considering an external BD ODD, but I have an internal one now that I could redeploy, and honestly my desk top is a mess - cluttered with scanner, tablet, two monitors, speakers, keyboard, mouse, and rems of loos paper, etc. I don't know where I place an external drive. In the cupboard until I need it I guess.

If I do give up the internal ODD then it opens up a lot of choice for cases and coolers.

Peter

Exactly. That was my thinking.

NickZ2016 said:

The new HEDT systems are supposedly/Allegedly right around the corner. Honestly if you need more than the current speed levels I'd lean that way.

Usually skipping generations lets you trade down and keep performance. That means a 14th I7 might be a better choice than a 13th I9 but you need to do without for a year.

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Not a rhetorical question:

Are HEDT (high end desktop) systems greatly superior for photo work?

I see that Puget Systems suggests an I9-13900K system (24 cores/32 threads, dual channel DDR5) for Photoshop, but offer (for more money) an AMD Threadripper Pro system (24 cores/48 threads, 8 channel DDR4) for Davinci Resolve for video.

a year is too far away for wait, if you have a legit reason to upgrade today. It will always be better next year. The only reason where I may think about waiting on Intel is if the 14 was a full revamp of the arch, as they are in the midst of repeating the P4 egg fry cycle where it took more and more power, only to be reset to sanity by the Sandy Bridge arch.

Benchmarks vary slightly, but in general the 13900 is a big faster than the AMD's best offering, for an extra 100 watts of power (heat/noise). AMD's 3D releases might close it, might not. I'm actually most fascinated by a recent Anandtech article where they took the topline cpus from each and dropped the power allowance.


The 7950X running at 105W delivers ~92-93% of performance compared to 230W. Still faster than the 12900. This feels like a nice efficiency sweet spot.

The intel, not surprisingly, did not fare so well at lower power levels. You need to keep the rpms up on these chips to get the best out of it.

And sure, the newer MBs will have more PCIE5, but it's pretty unlikely that any of us will see a tangible benefit to even faster SSDs, and I don't think the GPUs are saturating the bus.

Carey Brown said:

I'm considering whether to buy a new machine in 6-8 weeks with the i9-13900K which got me to looking up info ("rumors") about the next generation.

[...]

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Carey Brown said:

Thanks for your insights.

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Of course the next generation will be better than the current one in some aspects.

When I decided to construct another desktop, the fresh launch was the cursed i9-11900K but I decided to go to it despite several people in the net claiming it isn´t worth against the previous generation. Basically, the claimed the stuff was hot as a furnace and its power consumption was close to a locomotive.

1. The processor is running overclocked, almost all time above 5GHz and both, its power consumption is very low 99.999% of the time, as well it is very cool (water cooled with a 360 mm radiator with three fans)

2. It is a desktop, so the actual consumption isn´t a major issue like it is in a laptop

3. The system is way faster than my previous seven year old setup!

My opinion is it isn´t worth to wait for the next generation. You will get only marginal improvements.

Good luck!

I didn't notice a reference to the famous Intel tick-tock model , so here's a link.

If it applies here, the next gen of Intel desktop CPUs will be a refinement Gen 13, which was an enhanced version of Gen 12.

At a guess, it wouldn't be worth waiting for.

BobKnDP said:

I didn't notice a reference to the famous Intel tick-tock model , so here's a link.

If it applies here, the next gen of Intel desktop CPUs will be a refinement Gen 13, which was an enhanced version of Gen 12.

At a guess, it wouldn't be worth waiting for.

Click to expand...

the tick-tock model has broken down in recent years, starting with their troubles shifting to the smaller manufacturing designs after 14nm.

For most of the t-t era, intel was dominantly on top and could meter out progress slowly. When AMD passed them, they had to get more responsive.

Today I'm not even sure an I7 is that much better than an I5 for photo work. But if the OP is worried that a current I9 is too slow why not look at the new HEDT when/if they launch.