From Tom's Hardware: Intel announced its 14th-generation Core ‘Raptor Lake Refresh’ series today, with three top-end overclockable models, the 6 GHz $589 Core i9-14900K, $409 Core i7-14700K, and $319 Core i5-1600K arriving at retail on October 17 to take on AMD’s Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 lineup, including the powerful 7000X3D models that currently dominate our list of the best CPUs for gaming. Despite rumors of price increases, Intel kept the pricing for its three new models the same as the prior generation, thus hoping to stave off AMD's affordably-priced competitors. Intel also offers all three chips in graphics-less KF-series configurations for slightly less cash than their full-featured counterparts.
As the codename implies, Intel’s newest chips are a refreshed version of the 13th-Gen Raptor Lake processors that debuted roughly a year ago and carved out victories against AMD’s original Ryzen 7000 – at least until AMD's 7000X3D models arrived and re-took the lead in gaming. Intel says the 14th-Gen models reassert its gaming lead, claiming 'up to' 23% better gaming performance than AMD's potent Ryzen 7000X3D chips — though according to Intel's benchmarks, that works out to roughly a 2% lead on average — and up to 54% faster performance in creator workflows. Overall, Intel says its new optimizations give the 14th-Gen processors ‘mid-to-upper single-digit percentage' gains across the board over its own prior-gen models.
While Intel's refresh generation doesn’t provide the massive gen-on-gen leaps we would typically see with new architectures, the new chips have higher boost frequencies across the board, with a peak of up to 6.0 GHz for the flagship Core i9-14900K. Courtesy of a newer revision of the 'Intel 7' process node, the 14th-Gen chips deliver these higher frequencies within the same power envelopes (PL1/PL2) as the previous-gen models. The Core i7-14700K is the only chip to get more cores and the accompanying extra dollop of cache via four additional E-cores. Meanwhile, the 14th-Gen Core i9 and i5 models feature the same number of cores as their predecessors.
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