Intel’s 14th-gen Raptor Lake refresh might be a major disappointment

We know at this point that Intel doesn’t intend to release an entirely new generation for its desktop CPUs this year. The aptly named Raptor Lake refresh is rumored to launch next month at Intel Innovation, but a new leak suggests Intel may not have much to share on the desktop front.

For a brief time, MSI published a YouTube video showcasing its upcoming Intel 700 motherboards, as spotted by VideoCardz. Included in the presentation was a slide detailing the top chips from Intel’s upcoming range, including the Core i5-14600K, Core i7-14700K, and Core i9-14900K.

The slide claims the new chips are only 3% faster than their last-gen counterparts, which isn’t too surprising. The chips are built on the same Intel 7 (10nm) manufacturing process and they don’t include any changes to core counts. The only exception is the Core i7-14700K, which the slide says is jumping from eight to 12 Efficiency cores. This change, according to MSI, allows that chip to hit around 17% faster multi-threaded performance.

It seems Intel is focused elsewhere for performance gains. Another slide references an increased L3 cache on the CPUs, likely in response to chips like AMD’s Ryzen 7 7800X3D, along with support for higher-frequency DDR5 memory. As with 12th-gen Alder Lake and 13th-gen Raptor Lake, the Raptor Lake refresh is reported to use the LGA 1700 socket.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about middling performance gains from Intel’s impending desktop CPUs. Earlier in August, ASRock leaked that the chips offered between a 4% and 8% single-core improvement, along with an 8% to 15% multi-core improvement. That’s a more optimistic outlook than what MSI shared, but still not great.

And in July, another leaker claimed that Intel would be sticking with the same quad-core configuration for its i3 chips. Over the past few generations, the Core i3-12100F and Core i3-13100F have been great budget gaming CPUs, but a core bump would certainly help them be more competitive. This leak also showed the same core counts as the MSI slide, along with showcasing up to 36MB of L3 cache and a 5.8GHz clock speed for the range.

As always, it’s important to handle these rumors as exactly what they are: rumors. There’s a good chance we’ll hear official details about the Raptor Lake refresh at Intel Innovation 2023 on September 19, so we won’t have to wait long until the cat’s out of the bag.

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Jacob Roach is a writer covering computing and gaming at Digital Trends. After realizing Crysis wouldn't run on a laptop, he…