Question Is i9-14900 not good for gaming?

[Franknj229]

I was reading other threads, in other forums on this site, so I wouldn't have to ask questions that were already answered, and I came across a critique of someone's prospective build for a "really good gaming computer".

He had an i9-14900 on his list. Someone responded that they wouldn't recommend the 14900 for gaming, and suggested the Intel Core i7-14700F 2.1 GHz 20-Core Processor instead.

My question is, does the CPU Thread Community here agree? More importantly, can you explain why? I just assumed, newer, faster, better...?

I don't want something that's just good enough now. I want something that will be plenty good enough for at least a few years.

My prospective build, and what I'm using it for below:

CPU: Intel - Core i9-14900K Raptor Lake 3.2GHz Twenty Four-Core LGA 1700
CPU cooler: Noctua - NH-D15S Chromax Black
Motherboard: Gigabyte - Z790 AORUS Elite X WiFi 7 Intel LGA 1700 ATX
Ram: Corsair - Vengeance 64GB (2 x 32GB) DDR5-6000 PC5-48000 CL30 Dual Channel
SSD/HDD: Crucial - T705 2TB Micron 232L TLC NAND PCIe Gen 5 x4 NVMe M.2 Internal SSD
GPU: Gigabyte - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Super Windforce V2 Triple Fan 16GB GDDR6X PCIe 4.0
PSU: Lian Li - Edge 850 Watt 80 Plus Platinum ATX Fully Modular
Chassis: Lian Li - Lancool 216 Tempered Glass ATX Mid-Tower
OS: Microsoft - Windows 11 Home 64-Bit FPP USB
Monitor: MSI - MPG 321URX 32" 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) 240Hz Gaming Monitor

My goal with this build is to not have to worry about upgrading for awhile. 75% of the time I use my computer for very basic stuff (internet, editing travel videos and drone footage, microsoft office applications, etc...) The other 25% of the time would be for gaming. I'm not a professional or anything, but I would like to play at, or close to, the highest settings, and if something new comes out in the next year or two, I don't want to worry if my system can handle it. (I'm mostly into Fallout/Elder Scrolls/CIV type stuff, but co-workers want me to join them for some Fortnight/CoD)

 

[NightHawkRMX]

To start, the 14900k is not recommended as the i9 14900k and 13900k have fairly well documented reliability issues that immediately should make you take them off of your shopping list, even though the issue is allegedly resolved at this point. This is especially the case since you want it to last a few years.

Rarely does going from an i7 to an i9 yield you any significant performance increase in all but a very few niche circumstances. At 4k especially, your 4080 super is almost always going to be the limiting factor in performance, meaning the performance difference between the i7 and i9 will not impact your performance in games. For down the road as games get more demanding, you may see some benefit from the i9, but its unlikely unless you upgrade the GPU to whatever is available years from now. Even then it will likely be slight.

 

[Franknj229]

To start, the 14900k is not recommended as the i9 14900k and 13900k have fairly well documented reliability issues that immediately should make you take them off of your shopping list, even though the issue is allegedly resolved at this point. This is especially the case since you want it to last a few years.

Rarely does going from an i7 to an i9 yield you any significant performance increase in all but a very few niche circumstances. At 4k especially, your 4080 super is almost always going to be the limiting factor in performance, meaning the performance difference between the i7 and i9 will not impact your performance in games. For down the road as games get more demanding, you may see some benefit from the i9, but its unlikely unless you upgrade the GPU to whatever is available years from now. Even then it will likely be slight.

Thank you for the reply. I appreciate it. And this is totally on me, but I'm not sure if I completely understand how to utilize this information for my build though, so let me know if I'm on the right track here:

Regarding the CPU... Right now, for my purposes, there isn't much advantage to the i9 over the i7. There might be in the long run, but only if the reliability issues have indeed been resolved. So I'm basically rolling the dice? If I go with the i7, in two years I might need to upgrade. If I go with the i9 and there are issues, I might wish I went with the i7.

As for the GPU... Are you saying the 4080 Super is not all that powerful? Not that I necessarily need/want 4k capability right now, but the 4080 is pretty darn near the top of the line. Is the 4090 a big enough difference to justify the big jump in price for my build? Should I be waiting for the 50s? Or are you suggesting an AMD build?

Thanks again!

 

[Lafong]

At one time, I saw a list of Intel CPUs that might be affected by the well known reliability issue. I don't have the link.

As I recall, you can have "issues" with the i7 or i9. I think less so on the i5?

Or not.

To that extent you are "rolling the dice". 1 chance in 7, 70, or 700? Not knowable with any accuracy. If you take the chance and it goes against you, would you shrug it off?

Maybe the fix worked. Opinions differ. Pre-conceived notions prevail, as you might expect.

It's entirely possible the CPU will be the least of your worries.

Your crystal ball will remain cloudy. It's tough for anyone but you to evaluate your own nervousness or how indifferent you might be to diminishing returns as you pay more money for minor performance advantages.....with the "reliability issue" hanging over your head.

 

[dwd999]

I would never recommend an F cpu since way too many people here have problems and can't diagnose the cause because they can't remove their gpu and access the cpu's internal graphics.

 

[geofelt]

The issues with the 13/14 gen processors have been identified and fixed.
https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-c...re-instability-has-been-fixed-no-more-updates
The only requirement is to install the latest motherboard bios.

In addition, the warranty on these products have been extended by 2 years.

For desktop work, there is little base performance difference between the i9-14900 and the 14900K.
The 14900K has a default clock about 2% higher than the 14900.
And, of course, the 14900K can be overclocked.
For batch work where all 32 threads are fully loaded, the 14900K capability is some 20% better.

Your build looks good to me.

 

[FAhentai]

Humm, I will not recommand what you list there, here are some reasons
1st of all, using 14900 or not is really depends on what game and what setting you are going to use.
Basically, if you are going to do 4K gaming, which is very obviously expected, the requirements for CPU goes lower while the requirments of GPU is higher. Especially in some AAA tiles, here is an extreme case, you heard the game named Black Myth Wukong? If you try to go some extreme setting, like running it on 4K DLAA, everything setting to high meanwhile turn off the frame generation, then 24 FPS is what you got with 4090. Even if you turn on the dlss to 75, with frame generation on, you will get something about 60-70 FPS and there is hardly any difference between R7 5700x3d and R7 9800X3D, why? Because in this case it just requires too much GPU power, even the strongest gaming GPU can do that much, while a fairly slow CPU does not make any difference, after all, as long as the CPU is not way to old, it is powerful enough to work out 60-70 FPS.
However, if you are going to play those game in 1080P, or play those games that do not require that much GPU power, then, there is a day and night difference between CPUs, that is why almost all those so called CPU TESTs are done based on 1080P and 4090 graphic, low setting. Why? Because in that case, when GPU go full throttle, it can go that fast that almost no cpu can handle that speed, how many FPS eventually you get is all depends on how fast is your CPU's gaming power(this is another part I want to mention later), this is why there are some conlsuion says that 14900 is much worse than 7800X3D. I can not say that is wrong, however, it must not applies to your case cuz you are doing 4K. Even the future 5090 is unlikely to maxed out 14900's gaming power in 4k AAA tiles, 8090, 9090, maybe.
2. About gaming power, first of all, you should understand that since AMD R7 5800X3D, cpus' total power is not 100% transfered to gaming power. If you talk about gaming power, 5800X3D is strong, so strong that you can not even believe why it has that much gaming power while the productivity power is so low that it is painful to look at. Same problem applies to R7 7800X3D and R7 9800X3D, they both have more gaming power than I9 14900K. However, Do you really need it now if you play with 4K?
3. Despite the problem mentioned @geofelt above, I believe that at least for now, you should stay away from any Intel CPU and MB. It is not just because its gaming power/ power consumption ratio is bad but also LGA1700 platform is already come to the end of its life. The new platform is LGA1851, only last 2 years. Meawhile, AMD primised that AM5 will be there until 2027, which means that if you buy your CPU and MB from AMD, even until 2028, you will still able to update to the lastest AMD CPU and there is no cost, most importantly, no need to worry about reinstall Winodws. Image that, if you build you PC now, after 3-4 years, you replaced the CPU and graphic, everything is back to the top, no need to reinstall windows, tranfer the files. How good is that?
Thus, here is my suggestion on you current list
CPU, try AMD 9700X, both 7800x3d and 9800x3d are expensive, not worth it, remeber, if you are doing 4K, at least for recent years, you don't need that much gaming power from CPU.
MB: Go Asus X670E creator if you can, if there is no such stock, try Asus X670E HERO, if still no stock, try Asus X670E PRIME. Remeber, it must be X670E since X870E mb is a joke, that AMD force all the AIC to use its 2ed PCI-E 5.0x4 lane that directly wired to CPU to run USB4, which means in X870E, you need to down grade your PCI-E 16X to 8X so that you can have more than 1 PCI-E 5.0X4 that is directly wired to CPU to use. A joke isn't it? You may also have to do a no cpu bios flash in this case. It is not hard.
SSD: I highly suggest you to not use PCI-E 5.0 NVME SSD. It is way too expensive and way too hot, so hot that you may have to use its customized heatsink to make it work properly. Like this is not bad enough, it can not help you with any gaming expirence at all, why? because its 4K reading performance, which is the most important thing for gaming. In fact, if you talk about gaming, there is little noticeble difference beteween PCI-E 3.0 NVME SSDs and PCI-E 5.0 NVME SSDs. So save your money go something like KC3000 2T, more compacity is better than the speed, if you can, go 4T. Meanwhile buy a chip SATA SSD, such as Samsung evo 500G for your OS only. This is because when you are gaming, your windows will always read files from your OS disk, for the best performance, it will be good if you have a psyical independent disk for your OS. Of course, you can only have 4 M.2 disks and as I mentioned above, if you go amd, then this system will go with you for long time, maybe until 2032 you can still gaming on it. Over the years, there must be a lot of data, and you have only 4 M.2, better you save some for future.
PSU: At least 1000w+, better 1200w, trust me, it is totally worth it. Why? Because this thing is going to stay there for very long time. More power means more room for you to upgrade, god knows how much power RTX8090 is going to draw? Better a little bit more rather than buying PSU again. However, it does not means that you have to spend too much, basically, any ATX3.0/3.1 PSU will do since there since ATX3.0/3.1 standard creates a high barrier of entry, there is no bad ATX3.0/3.1 PSU.
Case: I am not really sure where you are, however, if you can, I highly suggest you to use this case,. It is a Chinese brand named Great wall. In china that case only cost about 40% comparing with US nevertheless it is totally worth it. It may not looks that fancy however this case has its unique and unreplacble advantage. I was never a fan of vertical GPU intallation until recent years, why? All the grahic cards are getting bigger and bigger. Look at RTX4090, how big it is? You can hardly use any other pci-e slot because they are blocked. However, for this case there is a way out, if you check the case carefully you will found out that it has 3 vertical PCI-E slots on top of 7 horizntal slots. Sure, there are some other cases like this but all of them have a glass side pannel, which means that if you use those 3 vertical slots to install your GPU it is very likely to go overheat since there is not enough room between the side pannel and GPU for air flow but for this case there is no such problem because instead of a glass side pannel, it has a iron side pannel with so many thermal holes on it. Meanwhile, when you do a vertical GPU installation, make sure you buy a longer PCI-E 16X extension cable and make it go over the top of those horizntal slots so that you can use other PCI-E slots again as long as you don't use any PCI-E cards that is taller than a standard PCI-E slot's hight. This is still not the best part, the best part is, you don't need to do it as long as you have the case. You only do it when you need to do it. It is not payment in advance, it is something like a room for future upgrade.
Besides, for this case, you can even do some creazy thing like this
That is all, it was so long that I can not even believe myself

 

[USAFRet]

but also LGA1700 platform is already come to the end of its life. The new platform is LGA1851, only last 2 years.

For some people, like myself, that is not really a consideration.
I don't upgrade just the CPU. If I'm changing things, I'm changing the whole system, and the current system gets passed to a new user.

I don't think I've upgraded 'just the CPU' on any on my systems this century.

But, to each their own.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Hey there,

For the misinformed, the i9 14900 is a stellar gamer. It has practically identical specs, apart from clock speeds to 14900k. The single thread performance/IPC are nearly identical.

Stop pushing the non k CPU's as being bad at anything. They are not. They are good at everything. The k versions have slightly higher multicore scores in synthetic benches, but the 14900 is one of the top CPU's right now.

Here's a very good comparison:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYRgVKfgRGA


If it's solely for gaming and you must have an I9 then if the 14900 vanilla saves money for a better cooler or something else, then it's worth it.

Edit: Keep in mind, these chips run hot. Expect high temps at heavy loads. Good cooler is essential.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Humm, I will not recommand what you list there, here are some reasons
1st of all, using 14900 or not is really depends on what game and what setting you are going to use.
Basically, if you are going to do 4K gaming, which is very obviously expected, the requirements for CPU goes lower while the requirments of GPU is higher. Especially in some AAA tiles, here is an extreme case, you heard the game named Black Myth Wukong? If you try to go some extreme setting, like running it on 4K DLAA, everything setting to high meanwhile turn off the frame generation, then 24 FPS is what you got with 4090. Even if you turn on the dlss to 75, with frame generation on, you will get something about 60-70 FPS and there is hardly any difference between R7 5700x3d and R7 9800X3D, why? Because in this case it just requires too much GPU power, even the strongest gaming GPU can do that much, while a fairly slow CPU does not make any difference, after all, as long as the CPU is not way to old, it is powerful enough to work out 60-70 FPS.
However, if you are going to play those game in 1080P, or play those games that do not require that much GPU power, then, there is a day and night difference between CPUs, that is why almost all those so called CPU TESTs are done based on 1080P and 4090 graphic, low setting. Why? Because in that case, when GPU go full throttle, it can go that fast that almost no cpu can handle that speed, how many FPS eventually you get is all depends on how fast is your CPU's gaming power(this is another part I want to mention later), this is why there are some conlsuion says that 14900 is much worse than 7800X3D. I can not say that is wrong, however, it must not applies to your case cuz you are doing 4K. Even the future 5090 is unlikely to maxed out 14900's gaming power in 4k AAA tiles, 8090, 9090, maybe.
2. About gaming power, first of all, you should understand that since AMD R7 5800X3D, cpus' total power is not 100% transfered to gaming power. If you talk about gaming power, 5800X3D is strong, so strong that you can not even believe why it has that much gaming power while the productivity power is so low that it is painful to look at. Same problem applies to R7 7800X3D and R7 9800X3D, they both have more gaming power than I9 14900K. However, Do you really need it now if you play with 4K?
3. Despite the problem mentioned @geofelt above, I believe that at least for now, you should stay away from any Intel CPU and MB. It is not just because its gaming power/ power consumption ratio is bad but also LGA1700 platform is already come to the end of its life. The new platform is LGA1851, only last 2 years. Meawhile, AMD primised that AM5 will be there until 2027, which means that if you buy your CPU and MB from AMD, even until 2028, you will still able to update to the lastest AMD CPU and there is no cost, most importantly, no need to worry about reinstall Winodws. Image that, if you build you PC now, after 3-4 years, you replaced the CPU and graphic, everything is back to the top, no need to reinstall windows, tranfer the files. How good is that?
Thus, here is my suggestion on you current list
CPU, try AMD 9700X, both 7800x3d and 9800x3d are expensive, not worth it, remeber, if you are doing 4K, at least for recent years, you don't need that much gaming power from CPU.
MB: Go Asus X670E creator if you can, if there is no such stock, try Asus X670E HERO, if still no stock, try Asus X670E PRIME. Remeber, it must be X670E since X870E mb is a joke, that AMD force all the AIC to use its 2ed PCI-E 5.0x4 lane that directly wired to CPU to run USB4, which means in X870E, you need to down grade your PCI-E 16X to 8X so that you can have more than 1 PCI-E 5.0X4 that is directly wired to CPU to use. A joke isn't it? You may also have to do a no cpu bios flash in this case. It is not hard.
SSD: I highly suggest you to not use PCI-E 5.0 NVME SSD. It is way too expensive and way too hot, so hot that you may have to use its customized heatsink to make it work properly. Like this is not bad enough, it can not help you with any gaming expirence at all, why? because its 4K reading performance, which is the most important thing for gaming. In fact, if you talk about gaming, there is little noticeble difference beteween PCI-E 3.0 NVME SSDs and PCI-E 5.0 NVME SSDs. So save your money go something like KC3000 2T, more compacity is better than the speed, if you can, go 4T. Meanwhile buy a chip SATA SSD, such as Samsung evo 500G for your OS only. This is because when you are gaming, your windows will always read files from your OS disk, for the best performance, it will be good if you have a psyical independent disk for your OS. Of course, you can only have 4 M.2 disks and as I mentioned above, if you go amd, then this system will go with you for long time, maybe until 2032 you can still gaming on it. Over the years, there must be a lot of data, and you have only 4 M.2, better you save some for future.
PSU: At least 1000w+, better 1200w, trust me, it is totally worth it. Why? Because this thing is going to stay there for very long time. More power means more room for you to upgrade, god knows how much power RTX8090 is going to draw? Better a little bit more rather than buying PSU again. However, it does not means that you have to spend too much, basically, any ATX3.0/3.1 PSU will do since there since ATX3.0/3.1 standard creates a high barrier of entry, there is no bad ATX3.0/3.1 PSU.
Case: I am not really sure where you are, however, if you can, I highly suggest you to use this case,. It is a Chinese brand named Great wall. In china that case only cost about 40% comparing with US nevertheless it is totally worth it. It may not looks that fancy however this case has its unique and unreplacble advantage. I was never a fan of vertical GPU intallation until recent years, why? All the grahic cards are getting bigger and bigger. Look at RTX4090, how big it is? You can hardly use any other pci-e slot because they are blocked. However, for this case there is a way out, if you check the case carefully you will found out that it has 3 vertical PCI-E slots on top of 7 horizntal slots. Sure, there are some other cases like this but all of them have a glass side pannel, which means that if you use those 3 vertical slots to install your GPU it is very likely to go overheat since there is not enough room between the side pannel and GPU for air flow but for this case there is no such problem because instead of a glass side pannel, it has a iron side pannel with so many thermal holes on it. Meanwhile, when you do a vertical GPU installation, make sure you buy a longer PCI-E 16X extension cable and make it go over the top of those horizntal slots so that you can use other PCI-E slots again as long as you don't use any PCI-E cards that is taller than a standard PCI-E slot's hight. This is still not the best part, the best part is, you don't need to do it as long as you have the case. You only do it when you need to do it. It is not payment in advance, it is something like a room for future upgrade.
Besides, for this case, you can even do some creazy thing like this
That is all, it was so long that I can not even believe myself

My brain hurts reading this But some good points

 

[FAhentai]

For some people, like myself, that is not really a consideration.
I don't upgrade just the CPU. If I'm changing things, I'm changing the whole system, and the current system gets passed to a new user.

I don't think I've upgraded 'just the CPU' on any on my systems this century.

But, to each their own.

Well, if OS can be easily migrate from one computer to another, just like moving disks, then I will not put that much weight when I am making my list.
Believe or not, my current computer is one and half year old, most of its disks are from my old computer that built 9 years ago. Yet until yesterday I still had some problem to use some of the software in my old PC. Not mention that during the transfering, I have to reinstall so many software, lost many game savings.
Besides, even without this, there is still no reason for using Intel. Even the ultra 200 family is a joke, still too hot and performance is no match with AMD

 

[MrstimX]

I was reading other threads, in other forums on this site, so I wouldn't have to ask questions that were already answered, and I came across a critique of someone's prospective build for a "really good gaming computer".

He had an i9-14900 on his list. Someone responded that they wouldn't recommend the 14900 for gaming, and suggested the Intel Core i7-14700F 2.1 GHz 20-Core Processor instead.

My question is, does the CPU Thread Community here agree? More importantly, can you explain why? I just assumed, newer, faster, better...?

I don't want something that's just good enough now. I want something that will be plenty good enough for at least a few years.

My prospective build, and what I'm using it for below:

CPU: Intel - Core i9-14900K Raptor Lake 3.2GHz Twenty Four-Core LGA 1700
CPU cooler: Noctua - NH-D15S Chromax Black
Motherboard: Gigabyte - Z790 AORUS Elite X WiFi 7 Intel LGA 1700 ATX
Ram: Corsair - Vengeance 64GB (2 x 32GB) DDR5-6000 PC5-48000 CL30 Dual Channel
SSD/HDD: Crucial - T705 2TB Micron 232L TLC NAND PCIe Gen 5 x4 NVMe M.2 Internal SSD
GPU: Gigabyte - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Super Windforce V2 Triple Fan 16GB GDDR6X PCIe 4.0
PSU: Lian Li - Edge 850 Watt 80 Plus Platinum ATX Fully Modular
Chassis: Lian Li - Lancool 216 Tempered Glass ATX Mid-Tower
OS: Microsoft - Windows 11 Home 64-Bit FPP USB
Monitor: MSI - MPG 321URX 32" 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) 240Hz Gaming Monitor

My goal with this build is to not have to worry about upgrading for awhile. 75% of the time I use my computer for very basic stuff (internet, editing travel videos and drone footage, microsoft office applications, etc...) The other 25% of the time would be for gaming. I'm not a professional or anything, but I would like to play at, or close to, the highest settings, and if something new comes out in the next year or two, I don't want to worry if my system can handle it. (I'm mostly into Fallout/Elder Scrolls/CIV type stuff, but co-workers want me to join them for some Fortnight/CoD)

Short answer is no. dont get Intel at this time if building new.
LGA1700 is dead. AM5 has upgrade options well into the future. 13th and 14th gen have issues. Although bios updates have supposedly fixed all of this, are we all 100% sure Intel has figured out all the root causes and no gremlins remain?

 

[USAFRet]

Well, if OS can be easily migrate from one computer to another

Do NOT, repeat NOT, count on this happening.

Trying to do that, there are 3 possible outcomes:
1. It works just fine.
2. It fails completely.
3. It "works", but you're chasing issues for weeks/months.

I've seen all 3.
#1 is the least likely outcome.

 

[USAFRet]

Besides, even without this, there is still no reason for using Intel. Even the ultra 200 family is a joke, still too hot and performance is no match with AMD

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compar...00X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-7950X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-9950X