Introduction

The Core i5-14600K is the most affordable of the three new 14th Gen Core Raptor Lake Refresh processors Intel is launching today. It is designed to solidify Intel’s foothold in the middle tier, succeeding the i5-13600K, which faces little competition from AMD at its price point. This is because while even the latest AMD Ryzen 5 series chips are 6-core/12-thread, Intel Core i5 processors over the past two generations have been hybrid processors, with additional multi-threaded performance from the presence of the efficiency cores, besides the 6-core/12-thread performance cores.

The Raptor Lake Refresh series is exactly what it sounds like. Much like the 9th Gen Coffee Lake Refresh, these new chips offer the same exact microarchitecture as the 13th Gen, but with slightly higher clock-speeds than their predecessors, and a few extra cores in case of the Core i7-14700K. The i5-14600K from this review holds onto its core count from the i5-13600K—you get 6 Raptor Cove P-cores (performance cores) that feature HyperThreading; and 8 Gracemont E-cores (efficiency cores). Each P-core has 2 MB of dedicated L2 cache, each of the two E-core clusters (group of four E-cores) shares a 4 MB L2 cache among its cores; and a 24 MB L3 cache is shared among the P-cores and E-cores. The i5-14600K is hence a 12-core/20-thread processor.

The Core i5-14600K comes with around 100-200 MHz increases in clock speeds. The P-cores come with a base frequency of 3.50 GHz, and a maximum boost frequency of 5.30 GHz—a 200 MHz increase over the i5-13600K. The E-cores now tick at 2.60 GHz base, and 4.00 GHz boost. The power limits are carried over from the 13th Gen, with 125 W processor base power, and 181 W maximum turbo power. Intel is pricing the Core i5-14600K at $319, but you can save $25 by opting for the Core i5-14600KF, if you don’t need the integrated graphics, a saving that you can spend on slightly faster memory, or a bigger SSD.