Another year, another Intel CPU refresh, complete with all the fanfare, bells and whistles, and general hubbub we’ve come to expect from Team Blue over the last few generations. 14th gen has arrived, and with it, a fresh batch of already well-aired processors are now available for you to purchase.
At first glance, these new processors aren’t quite as impressive as the PR furor suggests. Let’s take the Intel Core i9-14900K as an example, and compare it to the last gen’s 13900KS. It features the same core count, boost clock, cache, memory support, and a fairly similar
TDP. The only comparable differences between the two come in the form of the E-Core clock speeds being slightly higher on the 14th gen (we’re talking a couple of hundred MHz). Likewise, the base clock on the performance cores has been amped up by a similar amount. Yes, you could argue that there has been a marked price drop (the 13900KS retailed for $699 on launch versus the 14900K’s $589), but aside from that, there’s very little to differentiate the two, outside of a few software tweaks, namely Intel’s Application Optimization tech (better known as APO—think smart resource thread scheduling).
With that in mind, we took Intel to task, and got hold of the latest flagship CPU, the Core i9-14900K, with one aim: to really put it to the Maximum PC test by doing what we do best, namely sticking it in a kick-ass build and seeing how that clock ticks.