The last couple of months have seen heated competition between Intel and AMD with great offerings from both sides, albeit with Intel maybe having an edge thanks to excellent performance overall, especially from the likes of the Core i5-13600K as well as a cheaper platform price. AMD has hit back, though, cutting prices significantly and today we'll be comparing the Intel Core i7-13700K with AMD's cut-price Ryzen 7900X.

The latter now retails for $474 compared to closer to $550 a few weeks ago, but is still undercut by the Intel Core i7-13700K at $389.99 currently on Newegg. In terms of cores, the Ryzen 9 7900X has 12 with 24 threads, it sports AMD's new Zen 4 architecture, a 5.6GHz peak boost frequency and a massive 64MB L3 cache.

The Intel CPU has 16 cores made up of eight Performance or P-cores along with eight Efficient cores, otherwise known as E-cores. The latter have less grunt than a single P-core or indeed a single Zen 4 core on an AMD CPU, with some clever software and the use of its Thread Director feature, Intel can intelligently move threads around to make the most of the CPUs additional cores.

What we want to know, though, is whether the Ryzen 9 7900X is worth the extra cash or whether the Core i7-13700K is a better option.

Above we can see the Ryzen 9 7950X has a substantial lead in the combined Photoshop and and Lightroom benchmark score and this is repeated in other image editing tests out there too such as GIMP. Even the Ryzen 5 7600X was able to beat the Core i7-13700K here and overclocking the Intel CPU didn't really help much.

Above is the Puget Systems Premiere Pro benchmark and here its the Intel CPU that was ahead by a couple of hundred points, also outstripping the Ryzen 9 7950X.

Intel also has the lead when it comes to single-threaded performance, but by a very close margin over the Ryzen 9 7900X.

The multi-threaded score was a big scalp for Intel, edging out the Ryzen 9 7900X by over 1,000 points and the 13700K was also more capable here than the Core i9-12900K and Ryzen 9 5950X.

Intel had a small lead in Forza Horizon 5, again proving to be a slightly quicker option than the Ryzen 9 7900X despite a comparativcely modest RTX 3070 being used for testing.

In Watch Dogs, there was still scaling but around half way up the graph we see the game become limited by other factors so you'll need a very powerful graphics card to see any noticeable performance increases above the Ryzen 9 7900X, although the Core i7-13700K was still slightly faster.

Finally in Far Cry 6, Intel was again noticeably faster, adding 10fps to the average frame rate of the Ryzen 9 7900X.

HandBrake finally tipped the scales into AMD's favor again, but only just, with the Ryzen 9 7900X and Core i7-13700K only just separated with the latter a tiny bit slower at stock speed and when overclocked.

AMD also has an advantage when it comes to power consumption, saving ovber 60W compared to the Core i7-13700K, which drew over 100W more than the Core i7-12700K too.

Conclusions

AMD has a couple of things going for it with the Ryzen 9 7900X. It's a young platform so you'll have at least another generation of processors to upgrade to from this one, adding a degree of future proofing, while Intel sees a dead end with its 13th Gen CPUs as a new socket and chipset are planned for its 14th Gen CPUs.

It also has lower power consumption and while the Ryzen 9 7900X was slower in many tests than the Core i7-13700K, the Ryzen 9 7950X was faster in more tests and still drew less power.

Ultimately, though, it's plain to see why AMD has reduced pricing. Intel is faster in quite a few tests and is also cheaper with the Ryzen 9 7900X retailing for around $80 more than the Core i7-13700K. Intel also enjoys cheaper motherboards and also DDR4 memory support which means overall, a Core i7-13700K system can be a lot cheaper than an equivalent Ryzen 9 7900X one.

So long as you're happy to keep your 13th Gen Intel CPU for a few years and upgrade both it and your motherboard to a new CPU socket when you need to, then the Core i7-13700K is the better bet right now, even facotring in AMD's recent price cuts.