There were some high hopes for Raptor Lake after some game benchmarks, and a hefty overclock to 6GHz for the Core i7-13700K made it look rather good..

Now some more tests are out and it appears that the chip might not be the cure for cancer that users expected.  

At Full HD, the 13700K only witnessed gains of around 6-7 per cent in average frame rates across a selection of games (including Apex Legends, Far Cry 6, and Red Dead Redemption 2) compared to its Alder Lake predecessor. The 13600K sample was better with a jump of around 10-11 per cent when pitted against the 12600K. A 10% uptick in games at this stage, given that Raptor Lake is just a simple refresh of Alder Lake but the rest is a bit of a yawn.

Gains at 1440p were more modest for both Raptor Lake processors at 4-5 per dent, and at 4K there were improvements of 2-4 per cent.  Even worse, GPU bottlenecking at 4K meaning there was no difference between the 12th and 13th-gen CPUs with some games.

VideoCardz found some leaks of a purported Core i7-13700K sample CPU where the processor was overclocked to 5.8GHz and 6GHz respectively. The Intel chip recorded a single-thread result of 983 in CPU-Z, beating out a recent Core i9-13900K leak, but to do that the efficiency cores were disabled so only the eight performance cores were operational, and therefore the multi-core result was low.

A second leak witnessed the 13700K running at 5.8GHz, this time with all cores (including efficiency ones) running, and it achieved a single-thread score of 947 and multi-thread result of 12,896. Even that 947 is 12 per cent faster than the 12900K (at 5.2GHz) in CPU-Z single-thread,.

Raptor Lake laptop CPUs have officially been confirmed as arriving before the end of 2022, according to Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger (as mentioned on a Q2 earnings call). The 13th-gen desktop processors will turn up first, and are expected to be launched in late September, likely with an October on-sale date.