Intel i5-13500
The i5-13500 is team blue’s budget end offering in the i5 family shipping with a monstrous 14 core / 20 thread count. This is a massive increase as compared to the last gen’s i5 non-K SKUs which had no efficient cores. Being a part of the non-K series, it has a modest TDP of 65W. As for today’s leak, an Engineering Sample (ES2) of the i5-13500 has been used. One should note that the final product could have much better performance. In CPU-Z, the i5-13500 scores 767 points and 8227.5 points in the single and multi-core test respectively. To put that into perspective, the multi-core score is 61% higher than the i5-12500 from Alder Lake. This is thanks to the insanely high core count. Similarly, in Cinebench R23 the i5-13500 manages to obtain 19891 points in the multi-core test and 1901 points in the single-core test.
CPU-Z Comparison
i5-13500 vs i5-12500 (Single-Core) | 5.5%+i5-13500 vs i5-12500 (Multi-Core) | 61%+
Cinebench R23 Comparison
i5-13500 vs i5-12500 (Single-Core) | 5.37%+i5-13500 vs i5-12500 (Multi-Core) | 53%+
High Frequencies
The tester also gave us a glimpse of what sort of frequencies to expect from this CPU. Across a single core under stress, the i5-13500 boosted up to 4.8GHz. Similarly, AIDA64 saw the i5-13500 boost to 4.4GHz across all 8 Performance cores and 3GHz across all 4 Efficient cores. The only concerning part here is the power consumption standing at an astronomically high 165W for a non-K CPU.
Conclusion
Intel will deliver some insane competition next year with the budget 13th-generation CPUs. AMD might find itself in a tight spot because it appears as if Intel will yet again dominate the low-mid ranged market. The X3D CPUs are without a doubt amazing, but they cater to those on a relatively high budget. In addition, the high AM5 board costs have hurt AMD’s sales whereas Intel provides the option of using a last-gen 600 series motherboard for Raptor Lake.
