Just a few days ago, we published a performance report on the future Intel Core i7-13700K, which showed us that under the same conditions it should be 17% faster than its predecessor, the Core i7-12700K. The results of this test performed in Geekbench 5 and the note obtained by the Intel chip was 16,542 points. However, at the time I made two considerations that I think are important to remember.

The first was that, as always when we see results, when there are still a few months left before what is being tested reaches the market, we have to remember that some changes may occur that will modify the final result. In this case, there are still doubts whether the maximum frequencies of the Raptor Cove cores (power and Gracemont (efficiency) can be slightly increased, especially in the case of the former).

Second, and I quote “we can expect some chip performance improvement on a board with a specific Raptor Lake chipset (Z790, H770 or B760) and with DDR5 memory«. And we didn’t have to wait long for confirmation that the memory usage of the last generation really shows us, at least in synthetic tests, a jump in performance that we have to take into account if we decide to jump to Raptor Lakand.

The new test, published in Geekbench 5, surprisingly shows us lower performance in one thread, as it dropped from 2090 to 2069 points, but in the global performance test we can see without any reasonable doubt, an increase of almost 20%well We went from 16,542 points with DDR4 to 19,811 with the jump to DDR5.

To rule out other possible reasons, both tests they were made on virtually identical motherboards, ASRock Z690 Steel Legend WiFi 6E (DDR4 compatible) and ASRock Z690 Steel Legend WiFi 6E/D5 (DDR5 compatible). The only difference between the two boards is the supported memory. Both, as their name suggests, pack the Z690 chipset for Alder Lake, so we can say that the playing field was similar in both tests.

So the only difference is that in the first case 32 GB of DDR4-3600 RAM (1,795 megahertz dual channel) and in the second as well 32 gigabytes of RAM, but in this case of the DDR5-5200 type (2,593 MHz dual channel). This explains the reasons why both Intel and AMD clearly bet on DDR5 for their new generations this year, although Intel is leaving the door open (we could already verify) to the previous standard, while AMD is betting exclusively on DDR5.

However, we must remember that performance tests of this type, synthetic tests, They do not always correspond to what we later find in performance in applications and especially in games..