Intel’s “Raptor Lake Refresh” 14th-gen CPUs are here, reprising the designs and prices we saw on 13th-gen models, but bumping up clock speeds – up to 6GHz for the flagship 14900K. These minor changes come thanks to manufacturing improvements and more generous binning, but are they enough to break the deadlock and give Intel the fastest gaming CPU title once more? We’ve received the 14900K and 14600K to find out, as we put Intel’s latest against our usual barrage of game benchmarks and content creation workloads.
It’ll be a tough challenge even with (modestly) higher clocks, as AMD’s Ryzen 7000 CPUs are capable from the top to the bottom of the stack while often drawing less power too. This is particularly true of the current fastest gaming CPU by our measurements, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. This high-end CPU punches well above its weight in gaming and often eclipses the 13900K, thanks to its 3D V-Cache – which boosts gaming performance substantially in many titles.
You can see how the 14900K and 14600K fit into Intel’s Socket 1700 lineup in the table below. As a reminder, each of these CPUs benefits from a range of advances over their 11th-gen counterparts, with asymmetric designs which combine performance and effiency cores built on a 10nm “Intel 7” process node. There’s also a choice of DDR5 or DDR4 RAM and PCIe 5.0 support, courtesy of a wide range of Z690 and Z790 motherboards.
