I currently have a Core i9-12900K with DDR4 memory and a compatible motherboard. I can buy a Core i7-14700KF for around £290 and am wondering whether that would be a worthwhile upgrade. I mainly use my PC for esports gaming and programming. My current graphics card is an RTX 2080, but I plan to replace it with an RTX 5080. I game at 1080p now and expect to move to 1440p after upgrading the GPU. Would the processor upgrade provide a meaningful improvement, or would the money be better spent elsewhere?
1 Answer
It probably isn’t a great value upgrade. The 12900K is still very capable, and the performance difference between the 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation chips is relatively small for most gaming workloads. The 14700KF does offer more cores, which could help with heavily threaded programming tasks, but esports games generally won’t justify spending £290 on the swap. You’d likely get more noticeable results by tuning or overclocking the 12900K, improving cooling, or putting the money toward the graphics card and other upgrades.
I’m playing at 1080p currently, but I’m planning to move to 1440p once I replace the RTX 2080 with the newer graphics card.