Intel is releasing its new 14th Gen desktop processors on October 17th. Acting as a refresh for most of its CPUs, the new ‘Raptor Lake Refresh’ chips offer speeds of up to 6GHz out of the box for the Core i9-14900K.
Intel’s latest chipset aims to offer improved performance and improvements when compared to its predecessors. Intel claims that the 6GHz support provides increased game performances as well as CPU clock speeds, perfect for PC players. The Raptor Lake Refresh also introduces the new “Application Performance Optimization (APO),” which is said to help optimize the CPU depending on the game.
The Intel Core i9-14900K boasts significant improvements, offering 24 cores and 36MB of cache. With a maximum boost speed of 6.0GHz thanks to its Thermal Velocity Boost, Intel also offers a base frequency of 3.2GHz. Plus, it offers support for DDR5-5600 memory, in addition to DDR4-3200. The company states that the new i9-14900K is the “fastest desktop processor at volume.”
Intel is also bringing changes to its Core i7 processor. Out of the new series, the Core i7-14700K offers notable improvements. Featuring a bump from its eight efficiency and eight performance cores, Intel now provides 12 efficiency and eight performance cores, for a total of 20 cores.
The Core i5 is also receiving a bit of love this year. The i5-14600K offers 20 total cores, featuring six performance cores and eight efficiency cores. Intel confirms that it’ll provide a boost clock speed of 5.3GHz and a base of 3.5GHz.
Intel also confirms that Raptor Lake Refresh processors support Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.
While offering increases to performance, Intel intends to maintain pricing without any major price inflation. In Canada, the new series of Raptor Lake Refresh chips start at $449.99. However, they range upwards of $819.99 if you’re inclined to snag the i9-14900K. Each of the 14th Gen processors are compatible with Intel 600 and 700 series machines.
Preorders are available now, ahead of the October 17th launch.
