Intel 14th Gen i7-14700K Tested, 17% Faster Than Last Gen, Breaching into i9-13900K Territory
Intel plans to unveil its Raptor Lake Refresh lineup sometime in October. While these CPUs do not boast a new architecture, Intel does have some plans up its sleeve. We expect to see higher core counts and faster frequencies on these CPUs. Today, the i7-14700K has been put to the test and it gives some serious competition to even the i9-13900K.
i7-14700K Tested
Hardware leaker wxnod shared an image of the i7-14700K in a suite of benchmarking software. The core count has been hidden, however, the i7-14700K should feature 20 cores / 28 threads. This is already much higher than the 16-core / 24-thread configuration we saw on the 13700K. Going into the details, the i7-14700K features 8 Performance and 12 Efficient cores.
While there is no major architectural overhaul, we expect to see higher multi-core performance. Furthermore, there will be no significant IPC gain, being a refresh. This is technically Alder Lake Refresh Refresh as Raptor Lake was also derived from Alder Lake. In any case, the CPU still sips around 125W of power, but that’s just the TDP. Let’s go over the performance.
Performance Metrics
In CPU-Z, the i7-14700K scores higher than 900 points in the single-core test. Multi-threaded performance takes this number up to almost 15000 points. To put that into perspective, the single-threaded performance is higher than the i9-13900K which sits at 902 points.
Moreover, the multi-core performance is almost 20% higher than the i7-13700K. That is an insane improvement, considering this is just a refresh. Despite no actual IPC gains, RPL-R can prove to be a serious threat to Zen4 thanks to the high core counts.
Moving over to Cinebench R23, the 14700K manages to attain near 13900K performance levels in the multi-core category. Single-core-wise, it does fall short of the 13900K this time but still manages to be roughly 4-5% faster than the 13700K.
Summary
Things seem to be looking good for Intel, as Raptor Lake did have some unused performance left in the tank. This level of performance is not as high as something like MTL-S, however, it is still noteworthy. Besides, all LGA 1700 users can simply upgrade to RPL-R if they so need, without having to purchase a new motherboard.
