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CPU upgrade worth it? Intel 12700KF to 14700KF

If you're only gaming then mainly the difference is alder lake versus raptor lake, but that's not likely noticeable without a graphics card at least on the level of a 9070 XT or 5070 Ti.


The (heavy) multithreading difference is much larger, because the 12700K only has 4 E-Cores, whereas the 14700K has 12 E-Cores. If time is money, then the difference is worth it there.
 
Thanks, it'll be for some gaming at 1440p and mainly desktop stuff, I've always valued a snappy PC experience, so wasn't sure if this would make any difference at all?

I'm using an RTX 3080 - 12GB GPU.
 
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Also make sure you buy that 14700k new. You don't want to use one that has been exposed to ultra high voltages (from the older mobo bios/microcode) that has already caused silicon degradation. Recipe for disaster
 
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chaparral said:
The other thing you may find a 14700KF will keep it second hand value high being the last CPU gen for that motherboard socket for when it comes time to sell on.
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Due to the issues with the 13/14th gen processors I would not be touching these in the second hand market.

You never know how they have been used and what bios revision was installed.
 
Tommy_Here said:
Disagree - the 9070/5070 Ti is not overkill for 1440p 144hz+
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For anything with ray tracing, etc. something around that level is pretty much required unless you want to use like DLSS performance mode, etc. I use a 4080 Super with 1440p 144Hz and I'd say as of right now it is a pretty good match up.
 
I just got the 14700kf and it's a beast of a CPU, but I was coming from a 8700k so it was a really good upgrade. From what I've read it's just not that much of an upgrade over the 13 series or 12 series, I would advise against it. What are you doing with the PC because it's massively overkill as a CPU, the 12700KF should handle most workloads with ease outside of special use cases.
 
Agreed, not worth it really. My thought on used values overtime is that I would rather expect the 12700kf to maintain value years into the future more than the 14700kf will, precisely because of the issues around the chips breaking down as this issue hasn't affected the 12th at all as far as I l know, just 13th and 14th, I could be totally wrong of course as it goes against convention on an Intel socket ...but in this case, I wouldn't be surprised.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
I just got the 14700kf and it's a beast of a CPU, but I was coming from a 8700k so it was a really good upgrade. From what I've read it's just not that much of an upgrade over the 13 series or 12 series, I would advise against it. What are you doing with the PC because it's massively overkill as a CPU, the 12700KF should handle most workloads with ease outside of special use cases.
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14700K still one of the best CPUs out in my opinion, unless you are purely gaming in situations where the X3D CPUs shine which in reality most people aren't. Price isn't terrible, doesn't suffer from the unbalanced performance profile of so many other CPUs and power/thermals are tameable even if not great. If you are willing to roll the dice on potential degradation issues, which so far seem massively overblown, then 6GHz boost for gaming paired with some fast RAM gives a nice boost for gaming. I've also found it tends to hold up better than most CPUs when it comes to overall smoothness and responsiveness.
 
Honestly I ALMOST went 14th gen upgrade instead of going for my current system; because, as Rroff mentions, if you run latest BIOS, and if you want to be extra careful also cap the single core clocks down a little to ~5.6-5.8 and keep the voltages down, they really don't seem to have the degredation issues as bad as people would have you think; its the older BIOSes and the single core boosts pushing voltage out the wazoo that seems to do the damage over time; and as all rounders, they're great.
For me it'd have been a drop in upgrade from my 12400 (which was admittedly OC'd via BCLK to 5GHz all core so was a lot faster than stock).

What made me decide to go fresh, was that I wanted to put my old system into use as a backup system, which I wouldn't have been able to do as easily; and then on top of that the B660 Mortar Max which I had didn't have the long term number of M.2 slots I wanted, PCI-E Gen 5, and was limited to DDR4; and there are SOME titles where the additional bandwidth etc of DDR5 does make a difference; I felt I'd be compromising too much with the platform.

If the OP has a motherboard that'll take better RAM, and has the IO he wants, then it's not an issue, and if you see a good price on the chip, its worth going for.

By all accounts, Raptor Lake is better for gaming than Arrowlake, which suffers too much from essentially being more of a workstation platform, and also has all the same potential pitfalls as AMD in terms of chiplets; but Intel has less experience working with them.

I ALMOST bought a 14600K during the Intel Gamer Days sales recently too (as it'd come with Battlefield 6 in the price as well) but the deals here in the UK weren't as good as those in the US, so I left it. I would still consider it if I saw an appropriate deal in future; the 14600/700K would let the RAM in that system run at the full 3600MHz C16 it was rated for too (or maybe further if I got lucky), rather than having to run around 3300MHz for stability, due to the system agent voltages etc being locked on non-K chips.

If I saw a good deal oln a 14600K/14700K, I'd still be open to it though, albeit I think my Deepcool AK500 cooler in that system would become the biggest bottleneck haha
 
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Rroff said:
14700K still one of the best CPUs out in my opinion, unless you are purely gaming in situations where the X3D CPUs shine which in reality most people aren't. Price isn't terrible, doesn't suffer from the unbalanced performance profile of so many other CPUs and power/thermals are tameable even if not great. If you are willing to roll the dice on potential degradation issues, which so far seem massively overblown, then 6GHz boost for gaming paired with some fast RAM gives a nice boost for gaming. I've also found it tends to hold up better than most CPUs when it comes to overall smoothness and responsiveness.
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I went with this CPU for my recent upgrade from 8700k@5ghz to 14700K because the leap was big enough that the fact the 12th,13th and 14th gen all tightly score similar didn't really matter to me, it was a big leap either way. The price was very low in comparison to some of the higher end AMD ones. And quite frankly when I saw the game benchmarks it was obvious that for a target of 4k 60hz monitor that any modern high end CPU is fine. Benchmarks show all CPUs in non GPU limited scenarios with crazy high performance, you'd only justify something better if maybe you're trying to do something like 240hz stable or something insane.

The BIOS stuff wasn't a problem for me, coming in late the mobo was already flashed with the patches. I have no reason given what I've read to expect degradation.

The whole experience with my 8700k lasting so long and the 14700K being such a massive upgrade is telling me that desktop compute is really becoming a solved problem for 95%+ of the consumer market. It feels almost overkill. This is just in perspective of over 2 decades of building PCs and chasing performance. If anything technology like faster PCIE bus and faster SSD storage are bigger pulls, as Alexrose1uk points out.

But if I was on only a slightly slower chip and looking for a marginal upgrade I wouldn't bother going from 12th or 13th gen, the leap seems too small to be worth it, but if you need a whole new system either you're doing a large step change, or a new one from scratch, it's still a great all rounder CPU IMO.
 
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