Core i5-13600K vs Core i9-12900KF
Compare the Core i5-13600K and Core i9-12900KF on real gaming and productivity benchmarks, full specifications, live retailer prices and performance-per-dollar, then jump straight to the cheapest in-stock option.
The short answer
The Core i5-13600K is the faster chip for gaming, with the two closely matched on price-to-performance.
- Core i5-13600K is about 5% faster for gaming at 1080p (gaming index 70.9 vs 67.4).
- Core i9-12900KF is roughly 13% faster in multi-core work, an edge in rendering, encoding and compiling.
- Core i9-12900KF is the cheaper chip right now, by roughly 2%.
- Core i5-13600K delivers about 3% more gaming performance per dollar.
- Core i9-12900KF has more cores (16C/24T vs 14C/20T), which helps in heavily threaded workloads.
Gaming performance
CPU-bound gaming score: a geometric mean of in-game frame rates at 1080p, normalized so the fastest gaming CPU we track = 100.
Does the CPU matter at 1440p or 4K? Much less. At higher resolutions the graphics card sets the frame rate, so the gap between two CPUs shrinks — often to nothing. The 1080p figure above is the demanding case, where the CPU is stressed and the difference actually shows.
Performance per dollar
Gaming index divided by the current lowest price — higher is better value. This moves with the market as prices change day to day.
The Core i5-13600K gives about 3% more gaming performance per dollar at today’s prices.
Full platform cost
A CPU’s real cost includes the cheapest in-stock motherboard that can run it and, when the chip doesn’t bundle one, a cooler that can handle it. Here is the lowest-priced complete platform for each, and the gaming performance you get per platform dollar.
- Platform total
- $475.58
- Platform total
- $500.48
Cheapest complete platform (lower is better)
Gaming performance per platform dollar (higher is better)
Specs head-to-head
Productivity & compute
Efficiency
Gaming performance per watt (gaming index per 100W of TDP) — higher means more frames for the heat and power.
Where to buy
Core i5-13600Kfrom $339.00
| Retailer | Availability | Price | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | In stock | $339.00 |  |
Core i9-12900KFfrom $333.00
| Retailer | Availability | Price | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | In stock | $333.00 | |
| Newegg | In stock | $343.99 |  |
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