Day: December 14, 2022

Intel 13th-Gen Raptor Lake Processor Overview

Raptor Lake is Intel’s 13th generation of processors, and it’s one of the most exciting hardware launches of the year. Following up on the momentum it built with its Alder Lake line of CPUs, Intel is looking to retain some of the hard-fought performance crowns. It’s got new and stiffer competition, though, in the form of AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series of Zen 4 CPUs, which have already impressed for their efficiency and performance.

The Core i9-13900K is billed as the “world’s fastest gaming CPU,” but if you’re buying one only to game with, you’re massively underutilizing it. Professionals, workstations, and creators will all benefit from the sheer magnitude of power available. Streamers, for example, can comfortably look beyond using dual-PC setups. This one CPU can do it all.

Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake Features

There are many specs, details, and performance metrics to get through

• Up to 24 cores (a combination of P (performance) and E (efficient) cores) and 32-threads.
• Intel Thread Director optimizes workloads by helping the OS distribute loads to optimal cores.
• Intel Core i9-13900K is the “world’s fastest gaming CPU” with a 5.8GHz clock speed on the P-cores.
• DDR4 3200 and DDR5 5600 support.
• PCIe 4.0 (up to 4 lanes) and PCIe 5.0 (up to 16 lanes) support.
• P-cores, E-cores, graphics, and memory can be overclocked on Z690 and Z790 chipsets.
• XMP 3.0 support.
• Integrated graphics capable of driving 8K60 HDR video and four simultaneous 4K60 displays.
• Intel Killer Wi-Fi 6E.

Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake: Release date

Prices vary, with the Intel Core i5-13600KF starting at just under $300 and its K variant at just over $300. The range-topping Core i9 starts at around $560. The difference between the K and KF variants is that the KF CPUs don’t have integrated graphics. So if you’re building a gaming PC with a dedicated GPU, you can save yourself a little money.

AMD Radeon RX 6800 Graphics Card Overview

The Radeon RX 6800 is a high-end graphics card by AMD, launched on October 28th, 2020. Built on the 7 nm process, and based on the Navi 21 graphics processor, in its Navi 21 XL variant, the card supports DirectX 12 Ultimate. This ensures that all modern games will run on Radeon RX 6800. Additionally, the DirectX 12 Ultimate capability guarantees support for hardware-raytracing, variable-rate shading and more, in upcoming video games. The Navi 21 graphics processor is a large chip with a die area of 520 mm² and 26,800 million transistors.

Unlike the fully unlocked Radeon RX 6950 XT, which uses the same GPU but has all 5120 shaders enabled, AMD has disabled some shading units on the Radeon RX 6800 to reach the product’s target shader count. It features 3840 shading units, 240 texture mapping units, and 96 ROPs. The card also has 60 raytracing acceleration cores. AMD has paired 16 GB GDDR6 memory with the Radeon RX 6800, which are connected using a 256-bit memory interface. The GPU is operating at a frequency of 1700 MHz, which can be boosted up to 2105 MHz, memory is running at 2000 MHz (16 Gbps effective). AMD Ryzen 7000 Specs.

What’s new with the Radeon RX 6000 Series?

Radeon RX 6800 XT

Let’s start off with the star of the show, the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, a direct competitor to Nvidia’s recently released RTX 3080. At the heart of the 6800 XT, like the rest of the range, you’ll find AMD’s RDNA 2 chipset, offering a 54% boost in performance-per-watt than the original RDNA architecture despite being on the same 7nm process.

When it comes to the 6800 XT, that’s paired with 72 compute units, a 2015MHz clock speed with 2250MHz boost clock and 16GB GDDR6 VRAM, and it only takes a total of 300W power. There’s also the introduction of AMD’s 128MB Infinite Cache, which looks to reduce DRAM bottlenecks and latency issues for more responsive gameplay.