Disappointing Core i9-14900K performance/watt vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D showcased as Intel CPU appears to guzzle energy

Intel unveiled the 14th-gen Raptor Lake Refresh series last week with the introduction of the flagship Core i9-14900K, the Core i7-14700K, and the Core i5-14600K. As the name suggests, the 14th-gen processors are just a refresh of the existing 13th-gen chips, bringing mentionable but unexciting performance gains. However, what’s more interesting is the fact that Intel seems to be brute forcing the speed gains, as shown by the eye-watering power consumption figures of the Core i9-14900K.

In our review of the Core i9-14900K, we noticed that, although the Core i9-14900K outperforms its predecessors in synthetic as well as gaming benchmarks, the chip uses a lot of power to do so. For instance, the Core i9-14900K appeared 3% and 9% faster than the Core i9-13900K and the Ryzen 9 7950X in the Cinebench R23 Multi-Core. In doing so, the Core i9-13900K test system consumed a whopping 531 W or an enormous 50% more than the Ryzen 9 7950X test system which consumed only 353 W.

Our findings related to power consumption in benchmarks are in line with Hardware Unboxed’s review which showed that the Core i9-14900K test system drew a total of 533 W or 46% more power in the Cinebench 2024 Multi-Core benchmark, as the Ryzen 9 7950X system only needed 364 W in the same scenario.

Gaming performance and the associated power consumption is even more damning for the Core i9-14900K where the CPU not only fails to outperform the much-cheaper Ryzen 7 7800X3D but also consumes a lot more energy.

Our gaming tests showed that the Ryzen 7 7800X3D more often than not outran the Core i9-14900K, sometimes by as much as 28%, whereas the Intel chip only matched the AMD CPU at best. In The Witcher 3, a title where the Core i9-14900K performed identically to the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, the Intel test system consumed 563 W vs 497 W for the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, a delta of 13%.

Hardware Unboxed’s findings seem to be in line with ours with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D beating the Core i9-14900K by roughly 8% on average in the 12 games tested. Furthermore, the average power consumption of the Core i9-14900K test system in the 12 games benchmarked stood at 555 W, an increase of 31% vs the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

Long story short, it is quite clear that the Core i9-14900K guzzles power in order to present the small performance gains over its predecessor. However, the CPU fails to overtake the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and looks awful when we compare the performance/watt of both chips in gaming.

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