Intel Core i7-14700K and Core i9-14900K review: More features, mild speed bump

&xcust=2-2-2108211-1-0-0&sref=https://www.pcworld.com/feed" rel="nofollow">our YouTube review (which you can watch via the embedded video below), but for the main points, read on.

The Core i9-14900K is a cheaper 13900KS

Well, sort of.

When looking at the test results, you’ll see that the $599 Core i9-14900K all but mirrors its direct successor, the Core i9-13900K. In our content creation benchmarks, the difference between the two processors are virtually negligible. The biggest difference is in Photoshop, with a 2.8 percent uplift—small enough that you could almost attribute it to a margin of error.

^{Longer bars indicate higher performance.}

Our gaming benchmarks offer a similar story. The 14900K offers an improvement ranging from just under 1 percent to 2.6 percent. In more tangible terms, that’s just a few frames per second. The exception? Rainbow Six: Siege has a difference of 10 frames per second, but when frame rates are already in the range of 600fps, that’s still a drop in the bucket.

^{Longer bars indicate higher performance.}

If you’re the kind of person who loves performance charts showing brutal beatdowns, this “upgrade” will disappoint you. Yeah, Intel beats AMD’s standard non-3D Ryzen 7950X, but the gen-on-gen improvements are pretty ho-hum compared to last year, when we saw jumps as high as 48 percent. However, if you adore paying less for top-notch specs, you’ll be pretty happy. Remember, the 14900K will hit 6.0GHz when boosting, even if only for brief periods—and it comes in at $589. Meanwhile, the only other chip capable of 6GHz, the Core i9-13900KS, currently has a street price of $730. And that’s up from its January launch price of $699.

The star of the show is the Core i7-14700K

The flagship Core i9-14900K may sit atop the heap, but it’s kind of a boring chip. It’s hard to get excited about a CPU that sits neck-in-neck with its predecessor on most benchmarks.

Instead, the real standout of the lineup is the $419 Core i7-14700K. (A victory for middle siblings everywhere.) With its four additional E cores, it has a leg up when pitted against its predecessor, the Core i7-13700K. At least, it does in content creation tasks. In Blender, we saw improvements as high as 25 percent in the Monster benchmark, and the average across the Monster, Junkshop, and Classroom tests was just shy of 20 percent. In Cinebench R23’s multithreaded benchmark, we saw a jump of 17 percent. V-Ray 5 also showed an uplift of almost 17 percent.

Basically, during times when you use more threads—think encoding and rendering—you’ll see double digit improvements. When the load is lighter, the uplift is far more modest, though still a little bigger gen-over-gen compared to the Core i9 parts. It’s about a 4 percent bump in our Premiere Pro and Photoshop results, and about 2.5 percent in Lightroom. More singularly threaded tasks only have the 14700K’s modest clock speed bump to lean on, since its IPC is identical to the 13700K.

In gaming benchmarks, the 14700K posted numbers within 3 to 6 percent of the beefier 14900K’s results. If you’re a little more skewed toward gaming than content creation, then the $409 Core i7-14700K is going to be a much more cost effective choice. It also out performs the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X, which has a current street price of about $450. If you need to go with a current generation part, this one’s the real standout. It sits in a nice sweet spot.

You can reuse your (relatively) older motherboard

As iterations of 13th-generation Raptor Lake, Intel’s 14th-generation Core processors are compatible with 600-series and 700-series motherboards. No socket changes or even new chipsets are being released with these parts. So if you have a mobo that alread