Intel Raptor Lake Refresh i5-14600K fails to impress in latest Cinebench and CPU-Z tests

Chinese reviewer ECSM recently revealed in a Bilibili post some benchmark results for the upcoming Intel Core i5-14600K desktop processor from the Raptor Lake Refresh family. ECSM notes that this is an engineering sample so performance for the final version may vary slightly. Nevertheless, the performance gains over the i5-13600K seem negligible so the price is expected to match last year’s model.

This is mainly explained by the core configuration that remained unchanged from the i5-13600K, with 6 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. However, Intel boosted the max clocks from 5.1 to 5.3 GHz, even though the new i5 still does not include Turbo Boost or Thermal Velocity Boost support. By default, the i5-14600K has a 125 W TDP, but in order to boost to 5.3 GHz, the TDP needs to jump to 160 W. The engineering sample tested by ECSM exhibited a rather high voltage exceeding 1.4 V. This could be fixed with a decent motherboard that allows undervolting.

Besides the usual Cinebench R23 and CPU-Z tests, ECSM also used the new Cinebench 2024 suite where the i5-14600K showed the greatest performance increase over the i5-13600K, with a single core difference of 8% and a multi-core delta of 14%. Conversely, Cinebench R23 showed the lowest gains, with close to 0% for the single core test and 3% for the multi-core test, while CPU-Z reported 6% improved single core performance and 4% multi-core gains.

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