Is Raptor Lake Refresh going to be a winner for Intel? New leak shows a beefy mid-range CPU

Leak season is kicking into high gear for Intel’s next-gen desktop processors, as another benchmark has been spilled for a mid-range Raptor Lake Refresh CPU.

VideoCardz spotted a tweet from Harukaze5719 highlighting a Geekbench result (originally unearthed by Benchleaks) for the Core i5-14600KF. (The K means an unlocked CPU that can be overclocked, and the F denotes a chip without integrated graphics – but this makes no difference to the benchmark results here).

The 14600KF scored 2,794 for single-core performance and 17,190 for multi-core, which is 5% and 17% faster than its predecessor, Intel’s 13600K.

This was in a test rig with an Asus Z790 motherboard plus 32GB of DDR5-6000 system RAM. The benchmark also shows the boost speed of the 14600KF as 5.3GHz.

Analysis: A positive sign for Raptor Lake Refresh

That boost speed backs up previous rumors of the 14600K being clocked at 5.3GHz, which is a 200MHz bump over the 13600K. In theory, the whole Raptor Lake Refresh range will be upped by 200MHz with clock speeds in this way, with maybe one or two exceptions (some may only get a 100MHz increase), again if the grapevine is right.

As for the Geekbench result itself, given that the 14600K doesn’t change anything from the 13600K except that slightly faster boost, a 17% increase in multi-core performance looks surprisingly compelling (all the usual seasoning and skepticism around leaks applied).

Indeed, when you consider that 14th-gen chips are just a simple refresh of Intel’s current processors, the strength of this result perhaps suggests something else is going on under the bonnet here to boost performance. Although we should, naturally, not get too carried away with a single benchmark result (particularly a leaked one), this bodes well for Raptor Lake Refresh securing some high rankings in our best processor roundup.

It's certainly a much more positive leak than yesterday’s spilled benchmarks, which looked pretty wobbly indeed – but there were good reasons for that.

The rumored launch date for Raptor Lake Refresh is October 2023, likely later in the month than earlier. The chips represent a chance for Intel to claim back some desktop CPU turf, because lately, AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processors have been rather ruling the roost (and Ryzen 5000 models too).