The Intel Core i7 14700K brings something truly new to the table: four more E-cores than the Core i7 13700K and about $2 faster. With tangible advantages and a nearly equal price, it is arguably the only processor worth looking at for your next PC build that is a 14th-gen rather than a 13th-gen processor.

The 14700K comes bundled with 8 performance cores (P-cores) and 12 efficient cores (E-cores) and currently costs about $418. This is roughly in line with Intel's customer recommended price, but more importantly, it is only a few dollars more than the Core i7 13700K's $415, effectively cooling the previous generation of chips. Both use the Raptor Lake hybrid architecture, and while the architecture remains the same, the 14700K has four more E-cores and a 100-200 MHz increase in both E- and P-core clocks at Boost.

The slight increase in clock speed will provide only a marginal boost in gaming, as has been the case with other 14th generation K series processors. However, the added E-core is a tangible benefit in applications where a little more horsepower would be nice, and the extra silicon under the hood is a clear advantage.

It is the faster, lower-latency P-cores that account for the bulk of the game load and are most important when chasing frames. However, the extra E-cores can assist the game, either directly through the game engine or by offloading background threads and other tasks to free up P-cores. 14700K/KF and 14900K/KF include Intel Application Optimization ( Intel Application Optimization, or APO for short), which has been shown to improve E-core utilization as well. However, its scope is very limited and not the killer feature I would hope for.

That said, the 14700K is still a hair ahead of the more expensive Core i9 14900K in the majority of game benchmarks I ran, with only a 1 frame difference in Total War: Three Kingdoms, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Metro: Exodus. In F1 2021, the difference is 2 frames. The biggest difference is 9 frames in "Far Cry 6," but I honestly wouldn't mind a difference of that magnitude if it saves me a lot of money.

And this is a lot of money to pay for four E-cores (remember: these E-cores do not have hyperthreading and only count for one thread) and a slightly higher clock. This may be an odd notion, but one might say that Intel is content to offer the same kind of upkeep for free with the 14700K. Rather, if you plan to use your PC for more demanding processing applications other than gaming, the 14700K is still a suitable substitute for the 14900K.

This inexpensive chip is very impressive in multi-threaded performance tests, scoring major points in Cinebench R23, Blender, and X264 benchmarks; the Core i5 14600K performs surprisingly similarly in gaming benchmarks so choosing this Core i7 should also be concerned with multithreaded performance.

Nevertheless, if multithreaded performance is important to you, this is where Intel's chips shine against AMD's superior 3D V-Cache competition.

The 14700K also frequently goes toe-to-toe with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D in gaming benchmarks, and the advantage of AMD's chips is their high efficiency and low package power consumption. You can also get the Red Team chip for a bit cheaper than the 14700K, but otherwise there is a really good case for choosing the 14700K for its multi-threaded performance.

The 14700K is actually not the coolest or most efficient chip. Peak wattage is 253W and average wattage is over 200W, almost identical to the 14900K. It also rises to a maximum of 96°C under load, a comfortable temperature despite the 360mm all-in-one cooler on the test bench. By comparison, the 7800X3D's maximum temperature of 80°C feels like ice.

This leaves us with the difficult decision of whether to prioritize multithreaded performance or efficient operation.

Nevertheless, Intel offers more chips in the 14700K than in previous generations. If you are chasing multi-threaded power and don't want to sacrifice cutting-edge gaming performance, you won't find a competitor for the same money.