Synthetic System Benchmarks
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. 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.
We are going to start with synthetic system application benchmarks on this page. Note that the graphs are arranged from fastest to slowest. We have also highlighted the Intel Core i9-14900K at both memory speeds, for easy visualization.
PCMark 10
PCMark 10 Express
This benchmark focuses mainly on more lightly threaded office application types of workloads. Right off the bat, the Intel Core i7-14700K is coming out on top in performance, for office-type workloads, but not as much of a landslide as you’d think. Compared to the Intel Core i7-12700K the new Intel Core i7-14700K offers a pretty good uplift, however, at 9% faster. So far, the 14700K does offer the most advantages compared to the 12700K, and it is faster for these types of workloads than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. When compared to the Ryzen 9 7900X the 14700K is 4% faster, and compared to the 7700X it is 3.5% faster. Therefore, for traditional office workloads, on light tasks, it is the fastest CPU, but only at about a 9-10% advantage at most, but let’s see how it does when we hone in on more aspects of it as we use more cores and threads.
Geekbench 6
In Geekbench 6 Multi-Core performance we are now looking at multi-core performance, and for this, we actually see a significant advantage for the Intel Core i7-14700K, this is a landslide. The Intel Core i7-14700K is 14% faster than the Ryzen 9 7900X, which is pretty impressive. Compared to the 12700K the 14700K is 26% faster, which is a very big advantage and improvement from Alder Lake. Compared to the 7700X it is 34% faster and it is 38% faster than the 7800X3D.
The Intel Core i7-14700K is also very competitive on single-core/thread performance, where it is offering the fastest performance. Though, it is closer to the Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 7 7700X. The 14700K is within 1% of the Ryzen 9 7900X and 2% of the Ryzen 7 7700X. However, compared to Alder Lake, the 14700K is 14% faster than the 12700K, so that is a nice single-core performance bump from 12th Gen to 14th Gen.
3DMark CPU Profile
In 3DMark’s CPU Profile test, we are running the “Max Threads” test and looking at overall performance. Here we can see where the core and thread count advantage on the Intel Core i7-14700K comes into play, it actually beats the Ryzen 9 7900X by 15% which is a pretty big difference when all cores are being used. This shows how much faster it is at multi-threading performance. Compared to the 12700K the 14700K is 48% faster, which is just absolutely a huge upgrade from 12th Gen to 14th Gen. Compared to the 7700X it is 65% faster, and that shows the difference between 8-cores/16-threads and 20-cores/28-threads. Compared to the 7800X3D it is 86% faster.
In Single-Thread performance, we also see the Intel Core i7-14700K come out on top and find that it is 7% faster than the Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 7 7700X. When comparing to the 12700K the 14700K is 14% faster than the 12th Gen Alder Lake CPU, so this shows a good generational upgrade from 12th Gen to 14th Gen for Single-Thread performance uplift.