Intel Core i5 14400F CPU Review

How Much Does it Cost?

Well if we look at the price, it’s actually good news. Both processors launched for the same price, and while the 13400F has seen some small movement, it can now be had for $206 US while the 14400F will set you back another, are you ready for it? $4. That’s it.

So $4 for 4% higher frequencies. Now I’m not going to say that you’re going to get 4% extra performance, because it doesn’t work like that and other things are still at work like the silicon lottery, though we did find that the 14400F was stable with 7400MHz memory speeds, while the 13400F only managed to boot and be stable with 7000MHz speeds but again, this could be luck of the draw with silicon lottery and if we had a different 13400F and 14400F, we could find them supporting different speeds due to the integrated memory controller.

Overview

So there are multiple ways you can look at this. If you went into this expecting huge gains, then I’d say that you misunderstood the product and what it entails, because it is a refresh. That’s part of the reason I was somewhat reluctant to look at it, but I actually have other plans for the chip in some future content and looking at comparisons to AMD across more titles and more resolutions. Now if you knew that it was a refresh, then you’d know straight away that the gains were never going to be huge, but at a somewhat similar price point, any extra performance is welcomed though I feel if you can find the 13400F on a deal, which I have seen it as low at $185 not too long ago, then this would make more sense though if you really really want that extra performance, you’ll have to buy something faster as the F lineup of chips can’t be overclocked.

Now the more interesting stuff comes down to that thorn in Intel’s side, and of course, I’m talking about AMD. In terms of gaming performance, which is where I’d like to think most of our audience is geared towards, the 5600, 5600X and 7600 are all better performing than the 14400F in a cost-per-frame sense.

The 14400F is stronger than both the 5600 and 5600X in terms of raw performance, but for more money, so the argument of if you want more, you pay for more and you get more comes into play, but the real big one is the 7600. Not only are you getting the latest AMD generation of processor, but you’re getting a significant amount more performance, and for a cheaper price, and I feel that Intel need to address that, but, and it’s a big but. Intel does have an overall cheaper cost for the whole system.

AMD’s 7600 is $199, while the 14400F is $209 so $10 in it, not much. Motherboard-wise, you could pick up something like an MSI B650-P Wifi for $188 or the Intel equivalent B760-P Wifi for $160 so now we’re talking a $18 saving to Intel but memory is the big factor here. You can pick up 32GB of DDR4 for as low as $55 right now while the equivalent capacity DDR5 is almost double that so that’s where the overall savings come in, meaning that the 7600-based system will cost you around $50 more. Whether the extra performance is worth that to you, for that extra cost, really comes down to the individual because if you’re looking at the 14400F to start with, I’d probably hazard a guess that you’re on a budget, and $50 could actually be quite a lot of money to some.

So there we have it. The results speak for themselves, and in all honesty, things lined up exactly how I expected them to. The x400 series of CPUs are good in terms of performance and are able to rival the AMD 5000 lineup, but AMD has evolved since then and are the cheaper of the two so unless Intel are planning to drop their prices, if only by a little soon, I fear they may lose out on quite a few sales because of it.