Intel Raptor Lake Refresh 14th Gen CPU: Release date, price, specs and more
Intel's 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs are here. Best of all, they won't cost you more than 13th Gen Intel chips.
Unlike the upcoming 14th Gen Meteor Lake chips launching in December built for laptops, Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs are designed for the best computers and the best gaming PCs. While the six new chips offer more power than their last-gen counterparts, they're a nominal upgrade at best. However, their relatively affordable pricing makes them enticing.
Here's everything we know about Intel 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs.
Intel Raptor Lake Refresh: Price and availability
Intel announced six new chips launching at prices ranging from $294-$589, which is mostly in line with its last-gen processors. As the chart below shows, there are three main chips to choose from, but that number doubles when you factor in their respective -KF and -F designations.
The -F at the end means those chips don't have Intel's integrated UHD Graphics. If you own or plan to get a PC with discrete GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000 series cards, this won't be an issue.
Intel Raptor Lake Refresh: Specs
The $589 Core i9-14900K is the new flagship Intel desktop CPU, capable of achieving speeds of over 6GHz when overclocked using Intel's Thermal Velocity Boost tech. This chip succeeds the Intel Core i9-13900KS, which was once the company's fastest CPU and the first Raptor Lake CPU to hit 6Ghz when it launched early last year. For those keeping count, this processor costs $110 less than its predecessor.
However, the rest of the lineup costs roughly the same as their last-gen counterparts, which isn't bad at all. The new Core i5-14600K and Core i7-14700K are around $10 cheaper, for example. Considering how the new 14th Gen Core i7 CPU has 20 cores over the 14 of its predecessor, you're getting a better component for the same price.
On top of that, the new Intel chips are compatible with existing Intel 600- and 700-series motherboards, so you won't need to upgrade your motherboard.
While these new desktop CPUs don't have the AI-focused NPU built into Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake CPUs for laptops, some of these new 14th Gen refreshed chips do have a bit of extra "AI" help in terms of performance.
As of October 2023, Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility (or XTU) has been updated to include a preview version of a new "AI Assist" feature which attempts to automatically recommend tweaks to make your PC as performant as possible. This new AI Assist feature is in limited preview and only works with the new top-of-the-line Core i9-14900K and -KF chips, though Intel claims it will add more support for more systems in the future.
The "AI" bit appears to be based on this utility tapping into what it's learned from scanning thousands of PCs to offer you more tailored recommendations for how to overclock your own rig. The data is collected from scanning hundreds of configs of different CPUs, motherboards and other components. Presumably, this should be better than the basic overclocking recommendations already made by the XTU.
Intel Raptor Lake Refresh: Outlook
We've yet to put PCs with 14th Gen Intel Core Raptor Lake Refresh chips to the test, but based on what we've seen, the new processors don't seem all that exciting. The "Refresh" moniker seems extremely apt in that regard. From what we've seen, this seems like the textbook definition of a nominal refresh.
That said, folks with older PCs who are looking to upgrade won't exactly go wrong by choosing a 14th Gen Intel Core chip — especially given how affordable the new CPUs are. That alone is a good reason to upgrade if you're in the market for a new CPU.
We'll update this page with any new information we hear about Intel Raptor Lake Refresh chips, so stay tuned!
