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The wait is finally over, Intel’s latest 14th Generation Core processors have officially been announced to universal criticism from consumers and reviewers alike who attest to Raptor Lake’s untimely Refresh as offering marginal performance gains for a large increase in overall power consumption.
Bigger is always better, especially when it comes to temperatures and power consumption, those are the two things that Intel has on lockdown versus vastly more efficient AMD Ryzen processors, with not even the “shilliest” of tech journalist shills shifting favor towards Intel for their 14th “Generation” Core processors that’s only a new generation in name alone.
First and foremost the specifications haven’t changed barring the new i7-14700K which has received four additional “efficient” cores boosting multithreaded capabilities exponentially over the previous generation i7-13700K, but given how the tech press unanimously agrees that Raptor Lake’s Refreshment is a waste of sand, Intel could’ve very well have just released a potential i7-13800K processor with a 8+12 configuration to a much more luke warm reception.
Because the word “warm” doesn’t merely begin to describe 14th Generation Core processors which in essence are merely just pre-binned 13th Generation processors with a couple hundred megahertz slapped on the maximum boost.
Obviously we don’t really take peak power draw as a baseline for power consumption, however AnandTech managed to reach an absurd peak power draw of 428 watts with the brand new i9-14900K without any sort of manual overclock or adjustments, purely stress tests in an out of the box configuration, eclipsing the previous generation i9-13900K by consuming an additional 85 watts to justify its 200MHz clock speed increase.
Oh, and consuming over 90% more wattage than the Ryzen 9 7950X.
But that’s okay, because other review outlets have got us covered with exactly how much wattage you can expect to pull during mild gaming workloads rather than synthetical Cinebench stress tests.
Oh dear, it would seem that the brand new Intel Core processors retain its notorious nature for being immensely hot and inefficient further cementing the notion that Intel is severely lacking behind the competition in terms of their Core architecture but also from a semiconductor level as well, with the i9-14900K seemingly consuming twice as much power as the Ryzen 9 7950X and absolutely demolishes the Ryzen 9 7950X3D in terms of outright power consumption in games.
As I always say, higher is better, the larger the number the greater the satisfaction, we already knew that Raptor Lake was already hungry and hot so clearly a heavily binned chip would be even more of a furnace.
All things considered the i9-14900K runs marginally cooler than the i9-13900K, marginal is a word you’re going to hear a lot to describe this generational refresh, however it would seem that if you remove the default power limitations and simply go balls to the walls Intel have produced a miniature hot plate of which you can use as a portable BBQ grill in a pinch, running at over 118 degrees Celsius under a blender workload with MSI’s over temperature protection set to 115C.
Gaming is another story, or at least when it comes to Cyberpunk 2077, a glorified benchmark tech demo which we’ve stablished pulls around 200 watts in power draw for the Intel processor which remarkably remains cool, far cooler than the previous generation i9-13900K thanks to a more mature and refined processing node.
And even with MSI’s over temp protection set to 115C the i9-14900K manages to run cooler than the 13900K and even the Ryzen 9 7950X on Cyberpunk 2077, the Ryzen of which seemingly loves to hit that 95 degree target regardless of cooler you happen to own, in this case TechPowerUp utilized a Noctua NH-U14S to conduct these tests.
Right, so we’ve covered the hilarity of Raptor Lake’s power consumption and absurd temperatures, what about performance?
I’ve mentioned many times before that Raptor Lake and Zen 4 seemingly trade blows tit for tat depending on the game titles themselves, with Raptor pulling out a marginal yet decisive lead over AMD’s 7000 series CPUs when paired with expensive 7200+ MT/s DDR5 memory kits, however any such performance leap made was swiftly negated when AMD introduced its X3D processors for Zen 4.
Since the introduction of the 7000X3D CPUs, AMD has held a convincing yet once again, fractional lead in terms of GAMING PERFORMANCE and only gaming performance, if you’re one to play games at higher resolutions and seemingly need to maximize multithreaded capabilities, Raptor Lake and non X3D Ryzen processors are your go to.
But if you’re strictly using your PC to browse the internet and play games? Ryzen 7000X3D is your best bet and funny enough still remains in the lead, with the Core i9-14900K providing a hilariously low 1.41% relative performance gain compared to the i9-13900K in stock configuration.
1.62% gain in gaming performance with the power limits removed.
And yet the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which is by far the fastest gaming CPU on the market remains in the top spot, sporting a 4.3% relative performance advantage over the brand new Intel Core i9-14900K when paired with an RTX 4090 at 1080p resolution.
Looking at Frames per Watt however tells another story.
Not only that but the strictly gaming focused Ryzen 7 7800X3D achieves a 4% performance lead over the new Intel flagship whilst consuming almost 66% less wattage on average across the 13 games tested by TPU.
When dropping the resolution further, the gap between the i9-14900K and the Ryzen 7 7800X3D increases to 5.7% on average, with the 7950X3D basically matching it in terms of relative performance.
The only saving grace of Intel’s 14th Generation processors is the aforementioned i7-14700K which has seemingly rendered the near $600 i9 completely useless in terms of gaming performance, considering how there’s a 3% performance variance on average at 1080p between them, in terms of multithreaded capability the new i7-14700K is a little bit behind last generations i9-13900K, it is by far the only processor actually worth a damn across the entire lineup but even still Intel could have just packaged it as the i7-13800K and it would’ve gone over much better with reviewers and the general public.
There is absolutely no point in buying any of this garbage, what with the LGA 1700 socket seemingly on the brink of death, due to be replaced with Arrow Lake which looks a little less woeful than Raptor Lake’s Refresh.
Reviewers aren’t excited for these new processors while consumers couldn’t really care less, the i7-14700K does manage to match or lands just shy of the i9-13900K in terms of performance but it does so at the cost of greater power consumption.
For games you’re better off buying into Zen 4’s brand new ecosystem which is bound to last several more generations yet, with Zen 5 set to raise the bar even further over the likes of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D which surprisingly continues to hold the crown of being the world’s fastest gaming CPU in such dominant fashion.
This Refresh is so horrible that Intel have officially announced that they are saying goodbye to the “Core i” naming scheme following Raptor Lake Refresh.
Raptor Lake Refresh marks the end of Intel’s Core # brand, with 14th Generation Mobile “Meteor Lake” processors transitioning over to the new Intel Core / Core Ultra.
I however like to imagine that Intel’s latest 14th Generation Core processors are so horrid that Intel had no choice but to kill off the longstanding “Core i” branding just to distance themselves from this embarrassment.
Obviously in a bid to maintain relevancy and to copy Apple, upcoming Meteor Lake CPUs will adopt the naming scheme of Intel Core 3/5/7 and Core Ultra 5/7/9.
We’ve already got a glimpse of Meteor Lake already, with several Geekbench results having surfaced for the Intel Core “Ultra 7 165H“, “Ultra 7 1002H” and the Core “Ultra 9 185H” showcasing lackluster performance figures on a mobility benchmark renowned for favoring Intel Core processors.
Don’t let the word “refresh” fool you, this entire “generation” from Intel has been a massive farce. You’re better off procuring yourself a cheaper 13th Generation CPU that was thrown into the discount bin, or simply just buy Ryzen.
The only purpose Raptor Lake provides now is strictly multithreaded performance alone, the Ryzen 9 7900X has finally been eclipsed by the i7-14700K for certain but a mere price cut later and AMD once again come out on top from an actual value perspective.
Raptor Lake’s Refresh marks the end of an era, with the whole series being a desperate attempt for Intel to bide its time as they continue to struggle getting next generation architecture out the door with Meteor Lake being purposed as a mobile oriented lineup consumers will have to wait another year before we can actually get a glimpse of their 15th Generation “Arrow Lake” which is shaping up to be complete and utter garbage with a rumored single threaded performance increase target of just 5%.
I for one genuinely wish Intel can get their head out of their ass because with this garbage refresh providing marginal performance improvements and with their next generation CPUs looking to be a marginal improvement, AMD for certain are going to take advantage of consumers thanks to lack of competition in the CPU space when they release Zen 5 (Ryzen 8000) series processors next year.
It’s all fun and games to laugh at Intel’s continual blunders but we won’t be laughing in six months time when AMD bends us over in terms of pricing for Ryzen 8000 CPUs which are set to completely humiliate Intel’s 14th Generation and more than likely their 15th Gen “Core Ultra” processors as well without AMD even having to resort to introducing X3D processors.
