Raptor Lake Refresh Core i9-14900KF Underwhelms in Early PassMark Test

Intel's upcoming Core i9-14900KF flagship has made an appearance in PassMark, enabling us to see what the chip can do in benchmarks other than Cinebench or Geekbench. Sadly though, the 14900KF's performance in PassMark is not great, with the chip being beaten by both the i9-13900K and Ryzen 9 7950X in the multi-threaded benchmark test.

In the single-core test, the i9-14900KF came out on top of everything, dominating both the 13900K and Ryzen 9 7950X with a score of 4939 points. With this score, the 14900K was 5.5% quicker than the 13900K and 12.6% faster than the 7950X. Then against the older Core i9-12900K, it was 15% quicker.

But, that's where the i9-14900KF's dominance comes to an end — at least in this benchmark run specifically. The 14900KF doesn't make up any ground against its predecessor or against the 7950X. Against the i9-13900K, the 14900KF was nearly evenly matched, outputting a score that was 0.6% slower than the Raptor Lake counterpart. But against the Ryzen 9 7950X, the 14900KF took a more noteworthy loss, being 6.7% slower than its AMD rival. The only serious win the 14900KF was able to achieve was against its older 12900K predecessor which was 30% slower than the Raptor Lake Refresh flagship.

The i9-14900KF's loss in the multi-threaded benchmark is something that we haven't seen in other benchmarks. In Geekbench 6 the 14900KF was able to outperform its predecessors and the 7950X3D by 8% - 17.2% in both single and multi-core benchmark runs. But PassMark isn't exactly known to be a super accurate CPU benchmarking tool, and the 14900KF listing actually includes a "High" margin of error rating, so definitely take this new benchmarking data with a pinch of salt.

The Core i9-14900KF is part of Intel's upcoming Raptor Lake Refresh CPU lineup rumored to arrive next month on October 17th. As the name suggests, the new chips are merely a refresh over Intel's 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPU architecture, featuring slightly faster core clocks and more E-cores on one of the i7 models. Prices on Raptor Lake Refresh chips are also reported to be 15% more expensive than their Raptor Lake counterparts.

It'll be interesting to see how these new Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs fair in our reviews that will come out when Raptor Lake Refresh officially launches. Hopefully, we'll be seeing performance figures closer to what Geekbench 6 reports and not what PassMark is suggesting.