Core i5-13500 Review: Intel's New $250 Mid-Range Weapon

[Adhmuz]

It's a disgrace for intel that they still don't provide a decent cooler with their offerings. It's diappointing to see an entry level chip seeing thermal throttling with the boxed cooler.

Boxed coolers belong in one place and only one place in my opinion, in the box never to be used. Provide one or not, I'll be buying my own cooler no matter what, regardless of the CPUs heat output, as I want a cooler that performs well and makes as little noise as possible.

 

[meric]

Boxed coolers belong in one place and only one place in my opinion, in the box never to be used. Provide one or not, I'll be buying my own cooler no matter what, regardless of the CPUs heat output, as I want a cooler that performs well and makes as little noise as possible.

Good for you I guess? These are entry level budget chips, if they come with a cooler, it adds more value and is expected to offer at least acceptable cooling. If intel added a cooler in the box, you'd expect it won't thermal throttle within a minute.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

The 'platform costs' so recently beloved of the tech press (since AM5 motherboards came out) seems to deliberately ignore the costs of cooling a system, which can sometimes be around $150-$200 for the hotter things there....

you dont need a $150-200 cooler for....much of anything, LMAO. Outside of the likes of the 13900k.

A $20-25 basic air cooler will handle the i5/r5 series without issue, especially with dual fans. The likes of a hyper 212 evo will handle a stock core i5. Bigger air coolers will give it more breathing room are are typically $50.

 

[Neutronman]

Hey Steve,
great article.

 

[Cooe14]

The Core i5-13500 is Intel's new $250 offering, packing 14 cores, 20 threads and 35.5 MB cache. This is an interesting CPU that packs the larger L3 cache capacity of the Raptor Lake i5's for less.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/review/2612-intel-core-i5-13500/

This chip doesn't just "have less L2 cache than the K series parts"... It straight up reuses the last-gen Alder Lake/Golden Cove architecture & chip just like every other "13th Gen" CPU below the i5-13600K! Aka everything under the i5-13600K (including the "non-K" i5-13600 shadily enough!!! ) doesn't actually use Raptor Lake/Raptor Cove AT ALL!!!

The i5-13500/F reviewed here is basically just a rejiggered i7-12700K with 2x P-Cores disabled like an i5 (6x vs the i7's 8x), but the 4x extra E-Cores from the i9 turned back on to compensate (8x vs 4x).

Intel could have absolutely cleaned the clock of AMD in the budget and mid-range categories if you didn't significantly care about having an upgrade path, but instead they decided to just pull a Raja-era AMD Rebrandeon imitation and pretend a new "generation" of products (or at least part of one) wasn't just slightly tweaked rebrands of already existing last-gen chips...

 

[gimmespamnow]

So I have this CPU and I'm using it with the box cooler, in a case that is pretty small so I didn't have a lot of other options, (which means the case also has bad airflow...) And I fire up Factorio and play and I'm having absolutely no problems with cooling: the temperature has never gotten above 67C (and it bounces around and it often in the 50s...) The fan speed/noise increases when I launch the game vs sitting at the Windows desktop, (as expected...)

For synthetic benchmarks, sure, you can probably do better than the stock cooler. But for the average customer buying a middle of the road chip like this: spending $20 on a different cooler is just a waste of $20.

 

[Lew Zealand]

So I have this CPU and I'm using it with the box cooler, in a case that is pretty small so I didn't have a lot of other options, (which means the case also has bad airflow...) And I fire up Factorio and play and I'm having absolutely no problems with cooling: the temperature has never gotten above 67C (and it bounces around and it often in the 50s...) The fan speed/noise increases when I launch the game vs sitting at the Windows desktop, (as expected...)

For synthetic benchmarks, sure, you can probably do better than the stock cooler. But for the average customer buying a middle of the road chip like this: spending $20 on a different cooler is just a waste of $20.

I started with a Hyper 212 on my i5-8400 and of course it barely got warm even when doing h.265 video conversions (~67C) but that got moved to an i7-9700 and the i5 now is using the box cooler. It barely gets to 70C in some games though it tops 80C with video conversions but that's still a safe temp and not what it's used for any more anyway. The box cooler does make noticeably more noise and calls attention to itself so if anyone's sensitive to that, get a cheap tower cooler. If not, the box cooler is fine for stock i5s.

 

[PCMasterRace27]

It's not clear what the test system is here. It's nice that you show the DDR5 vs DDR4 config results, but it's really not a fair comparison against the other intel CPU's like the 12600k if you don't also post the performance difference of that chip with both DDR4 and DDR5 mobos for comparison to the 13500. It's not clear to me which DDR platform you're testing that processor with.