Intel® Core™ i7-14700K New Gaming Desktop Processor 20 cores (8 P-cores + 12 E-cores) with Integrated Graphics - Unlocked

I bought this CPU as an incremental upgrade to my i7-12700k , which will go into another more modest build. I really didn't think the i7-14700k would be significantly faster than the i7-12700k, but in some games there's a 10-15 FPS uplift. I don't know if that's the revised P cores doing the work or if it's the extra E-cores. The IMC on the i7-14700k is noticeably better as well. I can run four sticks of DDR5-5600 M/T at 5400 M/T (with tighter timings) which was a pipe dream with the 12700k (which topped at 4800 M/T with the same four sticks of RAM). With that said, it's going to be easier just to buy a two stick kit with the capacity you need instead of dilly-dallying around the BIOS trying to get four sticks of RAM to play nice on LGA 1700.Now is the upgrade worth it if you already have an Alder Lake i7? Probably not, but I was already putting together another mid-range build for someone else and this was an excuse to upgrade. But overall, I'm impressed. This CPU even holds it own again the newer Ultra 7 265k in gaming but will lose out to the higher end AMD X3D CPUs.The downsides here are that this thing has a massive power draw, and needs a beefy cooling solution. I have a 360mm AIO CPU cooler which cools it down nicely (60C-70C in typical gaming loads, topping out in the low 80's when benchmarking) but realistically, you're going to want at least a quality 240mm AIO or a god-tier air cooler. There's also the issue of the 13th and 14th gen CPUs failing prematurely. I have the latest BIOS for my motherboard that in theory should mitigate that problem, and so far I haven't had any issues at all.

People hate on this but idc what they say it blows AMD comparable out of the water everyone kept telling me get a 7900x3d so I did and it was okay but this 14700k is no joke. The ryzen sucked for sim racing couldn’t handle a lot of AI the 14700k with all the cores I can run 35-40 cars smoothly high graphics on beam ultra graphics with 18-20 ai cars. It’s truly amazing. YES IT DOES GET HOT. But I upgraded my AIO and now don’t have any issues. Honestly I put it in backwards once when I was redoing some paste had to pry it out bent the pins bent them back and still runs perfectly it’s tough. I don’t seem to have any issues with it I know they said the 14700k had some self deteration issue but this one doesn’t seem to I’ve ran diagnostics every week since I’ve gotten it and it’s still performing at 100 percent . Like I said it does get hot so if you get it DO NOT be cheap with the cooler get something nice. There’s not a single CPU in this price bracket that does close to what this one does it’s an absolute beast

Nice and easy to install Intel CPU. It works great too! There are integrated graphics so you won’t need a GPU right away although it is recommended to easy stores off of CPU for higher performance.

I guess everyone is right, these things are hot and then some. I went with a off brand AIO, and for the most part I'm good. It does get spicy when I'm rendering or doing some crazy multi tasking.Gaming seems fine, no issues. I play all kinds of games, FPS, MMO's, survival, etc. (Paired with a Gigabyte Gaming 4090 OC, Tforce 64 gigs 6000 M/T DDR5, samsung 990 pro NVME 2 tb x2, no OCing done by me.)I replaced a 5950x, which was having issues for some reason, just felt like it was getting slower and slower, thermal paste and heat were fine on it, never got over 60c with the beefier AIO I had on it. Just took longer and longer to render things. I guess I wore it out!I just think you'll want a good AIO, and/or a solid water cooling solution for this to really get the best out of it. I'm not sure a air cooled option will do you any good, but hey I've been wrong many times, so there might be something that can handle the job.All in all, not bad, but it's not going to give you much performance boost over last gen, matter of fact I found out later 13700k beats it in a lot of tests, blargh! Either way, its fast, and it runs everything great, so I'm happy till the next go around.

I decided the difference between the i7 and the i9 didn't justify the price difference, considering I was already getting about 1/3 more performance than my 12th generation i9. I wanted plenty of motherboard resources so I also bought the MSI MEG Z790 ACE, 32 GB of Kingston Fury 6400MT/s DDR5 and a 2TB Samsung 990 NVMe drive.Cooling had been a slight issue with the 12th generation i9, even with a 360mm AIO cooler, so I went custom loop. Along the way I found a GPU water cooler on sale and decided to install a lot of cooling. The Thermaltake 900 tower can take two 560mm radiators, but I wanted some disks, so I went for a 560x140 and a 280x140, both 45mm thick and backed by 6 fans. Four more fans feed air into the case and there's till plenty of clear space for more air to be dragged in.So what's the result? The processor runs at 85C worst case, and only two cores at that temperature. The fast DDR5 does make a significant difference. I initially ran it at 6GT/s then turned it up to 6.2 and finally 6.4. The last change is a 3.5% change in DDR5 speed and that gave me a 2.4% increase in system speed. I kept my old RTX3070 which used to run over 80C and now runs at 62C worst case. So despite more performance the system runs a lot cooler.I mostly run X-Plane 12, which runs the GPU and CPU very hard, continuously. After several hours the cooling water reached 36C and the worst core temperature was 85C. The processor just works. No stability issues with the standard settings on the MSI Z690 motherboard. There are three standard memory tuning options for 6.0, 6.2, and 6.4 GT/s and all work. This will do for me for a few years.