Upgraded to a 14500 - is my system balanced for the foreseeable?

[mattius1989]

I recently upgraded from a 12400F to a 14500. I went for this upgrade as a quick improvement as I was upgrading my case to accommodate the length of my new 4080 Super (RIP my old Antec 1200) and I didn't want to upgrade my MSI B660M A PRO. I am running 32GB of DDR4 @ 3600.

Most games are seeing full GPU utilisation (e.g. AW3, CP2077, Crysis 3 Remastered) and giving solid performance with high/ultra settings @ 3440x1440.

Baldur's Gate 3 and Borderlands 3 have given me something to think about.

• BG3 seems to be CPU limited at this res with max settings - is this normal?
• BL3 never fully utilises the GPU unless I use the less stable (crashes) and stuttery DX12 - is this normal?

Is there a chance I have overestimated the 4080/14500 combo or should this be a good match for a while yet?

 

[mattius1989]

So far as I know, the 14500 is still a 12th gen CPU in how the cache is configured (1.25 MB per P-Core and 2MB per E-Core cluster), so it doesn't push the gaming performance so far as a K CPU would, but it is still a decent CPU and the bottleneck is not unreasonable, especially at 1440p ultrawide.


Depends on the rendering mode, but from the benchmarks I've seen, yes, that is not so unusual for this type of game.

Thanks. Would you say the switch to a 14500 from a 12400F was sub-optimal? I was cautious of the higher TDP chips given my current B660 board and my understanding that the VRMs would be an issue.

 

[mattius1989]

Cheap B660 boards do have dodgy VRMs, but your board has hefty heatsinks, so I doubt it would have any issues with a K CPU (especially just for gaming).


I haven't seen any reviews of the 14500, so I'm mainly going by the 13500 and while the productivity performance of the non-K CPUs is pretty strong, the gaming performance is definitely a step down on a 13th/14th gen K CPU with the new cache config. So, if you're mainly a gamer, it probably wasn't the best choice to pair with a 4080 Super, but most games should run just fine and the higher clock speeds should help it to compete.

Can you confirm what the cache config is with CPU-Z?

L1 Data 6 x 48kb + 8 x 32kb
L1 Inst 6 x 32kb + 8 x 64kb
L2 6 x 1.25mb + 2 x 2mb
L3. 24MBytes

Intel Core i5 14500 @ 4588.78 MHz - CPU-Z VALIDATOR

[9m7glf] Validated Dump by MATTPC (2024-02-14 15:00:15) - MB: MSI PRO B660M-A DDR4 (MS-7D43) - RAM: 32768 MB

valid.x86.fr

 

[mattius1989]

Yeah, as suspected that's the old cache config, so I'd expect once the reviews are out that it'll slot in behind the 13th/14th K CPUs, but the 14th gen clock speed boost will definitely help.

Thanks. Is it at least better than the 12400F it replaced?

 

[mattius1989]

It has 8 E-Cores that the 12400F doesn't have (any), for a start

The all-core boost clock is 4.6 Ghz on the 14500, only 4 Ghz on the 12400.

The IGP is an upgrade too (though the F didn't have one), since it has the full EUs and two codec engines.

I'd expect it to be faster than the 12600K in games (12600K's all-core boost is 4.5 Ghz) and all previous i5 CPUs in productivity (except for the 13600K).

Thanks for all the advice.

Semi-related, am I gimping my setup with this CPU running with DDR4 or is there not much a benefit going to DDR5 for gaming at this stage?

 

[mattius1989]

It is hard to say 100%, because most of the reviews are using K CPUs (and the cache config changes the impact of memory speed), but the short answer is: no.

The longer answer is: maybe, if you're running CPU bottlenecked a lot, then fast DDR5 would push up your frame rate. Outside of chasing frames in esports, it is not something I'd bother changing your motherboard and memory for, especially if the kind of games you're playing are hitting 100% GPU utilisation at 1440p UW.

Thanks. The only games that have stood out as sub-max GPU utilisation so far are BG3 and Borderlands 3. I understand BG3 is CPU limited for the most part and I am hoping Borderlands 3 is just poorly optimised - DX12 maxes the GPU but seems to crash frequently when I've tested it.

My 3DMark results seem to stack up with other 4080 Super cards, placing within the top 25% IIRC.