As we move into the tail end of 2023, Intel are launching their 14th generation of Gen Core processors, Raptor Lake refresh and while it’s new, it is only a refresh of what we saw on the 13th generation Raptor Lake processors, so while we should see an uplift in performance, in all honesty, it’s not going to be anything mind blowing, and due to how close I think the performance will actually be, we’re bundling all three processors into one piece of content with the i5 14600K, i7 14700K and the flagship, at least for now i9 14900K.
Refreshes are nothing new. We’ve seen it before from both AMD and Intel with new generations from Team Blue or XT branded products from Team Red that give them a chance to refine their process a bit, squeeze a bit more power out of it and in some cases actually increase the core count slightly. Now with the 14th gen, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
Intel Core i5 14600K
Firstly, the i5 14600K, which is arguably the CPU out of the three that has seen the least amount of work done to it, with no core changes, no extra cache and the only real change coming in terms of speeds. The E-Core max turbo frequency has been increased from 3.9GHz on the 13th gen to 4GHz on the newer 14th gen, while the P-Core max turbo frequency has increased from 5.1GHz to 5.3GHz, so we should see a small uplift in performance for applications that can harness a longer, sustained period of boost, and maybe even in gaming, which we’ve tested the chip in 15 games so that’s going to be interesting to see.
Intel Core i7 14700K
Moving up the stack to the i7 14700K. This CPU has actually seen an increase in the core count, ever so slightly from the same 8 performance cores that its predecessor had, but now sees 12 efficiency cores, up from 8 on the i7 13700K. Along with this and the fact that it has more cores means that it also comes with more cache, now at 33MB, up from 30MB on the 13th gen counterpart. We also get a slight boost in speeds again with the Turbo Max 3.0 frequency now hitting 5.6GHz, which is a 200MHz increase over the 13th gen equivalent at 5.4GHz along with the P-core max turbo frequency increasing from 5.3GHz to 5.5GHz and the E-Core max turbo frequency seeing a smaller 100MHz boost up to 4.3GHz so in theory, I’d like to think we’ll see a bigger uplift though again, it’s more likely in multi-threaded tasks than single-threaded applications.
Intel Core i9 14900K
Lastly, moving up to the flagship i9 14900K. This, much like the i5 has seen no physical changes in core or thread counts, along with sporting the same 36MB Intel Smart cache, but again has had some tweaks to its speeds and if anything, can be seen as more of a marketing effort than anything, now hitting an Intel Thermal Velocity boost frequency of 6GHz, which is a 200MHz over its older brother and in all honesty, 6GHz is just a better buzzword number compared to 5.8GHz, hence why I think it’s more of a marketing move than anything that will provide significant amounts of extra performance. Along with this, the Turbo boost max 3.0 frequency has seen a 100MHz increase up to 5.8GHz, the P-Core max turbo frequency is now 200MHz faster at 5.6GHz, and the E-Core boost is 100MHz faster, now at 4.3GHz, but unlike the other CPUs, the base frequencies on both the P-Cores and E-Cores have both seen a 200MHz increase now at 3GHz and 2.2GHz respectively.
