Test Setup
We utilized two platforms and motherboards in this review, the ASRock Phantom Gaming Z790 NOVA WIFI for the Intel CPUs and the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR X670E HERO for the AMD CPUs. Both motherboards are updated to the latest BIOS at the time of writing. All of the CPUs were cooled by the MSI MEG CORELIQUID S360 AIO 360mm AIO with the same “Gaming” fan profile preset set in the MSI Center Software, and the same tube of MX4 thermal grease was used on each one. An NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition with driver 537.42 was used on all CPUs.
We are using a Teamgroup T-Force Delta DDR5 32GB Kit to test at 7200MT/s DDR5 frequency at XMP 1. On the AMD platform we are testing at 6000MT/s to keep the Infinity Fabric and IMC at the best ratio for performance to reduce latency, this is the recommended best performance frequency from AMD. We are testing “best performance” to “best performance” for each platform, we don’t want to limit them.
Windows 11 Pro is a fresh installation on each platform, with 22H2 22621.2506 version installed, which is the latest version with the latest Windows Updates. We are using the BALANCED power profile in Windows Settings. Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling is ENABLED in Windows. Virtual Based Security (VBS) is DISABLED and Game Mode is ENABLED.
For testing, we are comparing the Intel Core i7-14700K to the 12th Generation Intel Core i7-12700K Alder Lake CPU. This CPU launched in 2021 and had an RCP USD of $409, which is the same as the 13th Gen 13700K and 14th Gen 14700K. Therefore, keep in mind as you look through the performance, there are greater gains from Alder Lake to Raptor Lake Refresh due to Cache increases, power differences, and clock frequency. We did not have a 13700K at the time of testing for comparison, but the comparison from the 12700K will give us an overall big picture of how the “xx700K” CPU SKU has evolved from the 12th Gen to now the 14th Gen, over the whole lifetime of the Socket.
We are also including the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X which has a higher MSRP, but the new Intel Core i7-14700K competes with it in terms of thread count. The Ryzen 9 7900X has 12-cores/24-threads while Intel Core i7-14700K has 20-cores/28-threads. We are also including Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 7 7800X3D since they are price comparable by MSRP, and 8-core CPUs.
