Intel's 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh is ready to take on the best CPUs for gaming. PC Canada (via momomo_us) has listed the trio of K-series chips and their KF-series counterparts on its online store. As with all early retailer listings, please treat them cautiously since they could be placeholders.
The Core i9-14900K and Core i9-14900KF are only around 3% more expensive than the Core i9-13900K and Core i9-13900KF, respectively. The Core i9-14900K, which appears to be faster than the Core i9-13900KS, costs $833 compared to $979.99 for the special-edition Raptor Lake chip.
On the other hand, the Core i7-14700K and Core i7-14700KF carry 2% and 4% higher price tags than the Core i7-13700K and Core i7-13700KF, respectively. The slight price increase surprises since the Core i7 K-series chips are the only Raptor Lake Refresh SKUs to receive a somewhat noticeable upgrade. Besides the higher clock speeds, the Core i7-14700K has four more E-cores than the Core i7-13700K.
Meanwhile, the Core i5-14600K and Core i5-14600KF only exhibited 4% and 3% higher pricing than the Core i5-13600K and Core i5-13600KF, respectively. It's good that the price hike is consistent with other Raptor Lake Refresh SKUs since the Core i5 chips have always been the more budget-friendly parts for gamers.
Intel 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh Pricing
It's comforting that Raptor Lake Refresh isn't significantly more expensive than the regular Raptor Lake lineup. Early speculation pegged the new 10nm chips with a 15% higher price tag. However, please don't hold your breath yet, as the Raptor Lake Refresh hasn't launched yet, so we don't have the official pricing. Intel will reportedly unleash Raptor Lake Refresh in October, just a month from today.
Raptor Lake Refresh will happily drop into the existing Intel 700-series motherboards with the LGA1700 socket. A minor firmware update, available months prior, will enable motherboards to house the new processors. Nonetheless, many motherboard vendors have launched new and revised 700-series motherboards for Raptor Lake Refresh with enhanced power delivery subsystems and upgraded connectivity, such as faster Wi-Fi. For those who don't have to spend on a new motherboard, the existing LGA1700 motherboards are just fine. You can even recycle your CPU cooler and DDR4 or DDR5 memory too.
A less than 5% higher price tag seems fair since alleged Intel CPU performance projections have Raptor Lake Refresh just 3% faster than Raptor Lake. Sensibly, the Core i7 models are the stars of the show since the minor E-core upgrade could propel chips like the Core i7-14700K to offer up to 17% higher multi-core performance in some workloads.
