Intel's 14th Gen CPUs are now so cheap it might be worth rolling the dice on those supposedly solved instability issues

pcgamer.com:

According to Nick, our in-house chip-sniffer extraordinaire, Intel's microcode patches do indeed seem to have solved the voltage spike issues at the root of the 13th and 14th Gen Core CPU instability problem. With that in mind, the sudden price cratering of run-out 14th Gen models, no doubt in anticipation of the arrival of Intel's shiny new Arrow Lake processors, makes for an intriguing development.

That's especially true when you consider the disappointing gaming performance of Arrow Lake and to some extent AMD's latest Zen 5-based CPUs, too. Long story short, 14th Gen Intel is still very decent for gaming and with new CPUs from both Intel and AMD recently released, the competitive landscape won't be changing much for the next year or two.

But what of specifics? Well, how about an Intel Core i5 14600KF for $230 on Amazon? When we first reviewed the closely related 14600K (the «F» suffix indicates that the mostly irrelevant integrated GPU has been disabled) almost exactly one year ago, it was a $330 chip.

Now you can have exactly the same setup of six Raptor Cove spec Performance cores running at up to 5.3GHz and eight Gracemont Efficient cores for fully $100 less.

That's one heck of a price drop. Moreover, according to Intel's own benchmarks for the top Arrow Lake CPU, the Core Ultra 9 285K, the new chip is actually very slightly slower on average for games than the old Core i9 14900K.

The equivalent model to the 14600KF in the new Arrow Lake range is the Core Ultra 5 245KF which has a recommended retail price of $294. For gaming, the extra $65 or thereabouts for the new chip will net you very little.

Of course, when you broaden out the remit a bit, Arrow Lake has stuff going for it. It's much more efficient, has some advantages for content creation and gets you into a brand new Intel CPU socket and platform and therefore offers more upgrade potential down the line.

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