Will Intel’s cheapest 14th-gen CPU be worth buying? Price leak gives us a hint

An Intel Core i7-14700K slotted into a motherboard
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

Intel’s Core i3-14100 processor has had its price leaked by a US retailer, ahead of the CPU’s rumored reveal next month at CES 2024 (along with the rest of the Raptor Lake Refresh line-up not yet released by Team Blue).

On X (formerly Twitter), @momomo_us was hawk-eyed enough to spot the retailer, BLT, posting the price of this 14th-gen processor as $150 (around £120, AU$220). Unlike most leaks, though, this isn’t the retail price, but the price for bulk buying trays of the CPU.

The Core i3-14100 is a quad-core chip (with 8 threads – and no efficiency cores), and represents the least powerful Raptor Lake Refresh processor on the desktop – and thus the most affordable.

Compared to the Core i3-13100, it’ll stay pretty much the same, but the boost speed gets an uplift, so the rumors reckon. It’s 4.7GHz, so 200MHz faster, which is quite believable seeing as this is the case with other 14th-gen CPUs. Intel appears to be targeting a 200MHz uptick with most (but not all) of this silicon.

In theory, we will see this CPU, and other non-K processors for the 14th-gen, on January 8. (Thus far, only ‘K’ chips, which are unlocked for overclocking, have been released – non-K models can’t be overclocked, and run a little slower than any ‘K’ equivalent).


Analysis: Price considerations

With the price of the 14100 being for volume purchases here (retailers or PC makers buying trays of chips), you might shrug your shoulders and wonder what the relevance is to the average consumer.

Well, the screenshot the leaker provides shows the tray price for the 13100, and it’s almost the same – just a touch under, actually, at $148.

Indeed, in the US, the current retail price for the 13100 stands at this level – $148 (at Newegg, at the time of writing) – so add seasoning, but the intention for Intel would seem to be to debut the Core i3-14100 at just about the same price, or maybe a touch more, for the consumer.

That makes sense as the currently released Raptor Lake Refresh models are pitched at about the same price as their Raptor Lake counterparts. (The 14900K is the same price, with the 14700K and 14600K actually dropping very slightly, but they’re all around the same ballpark as the last-gen really).

It’s possible Intel may go the other direction and notch things up a tiny bit with lower-end CPUs, certainly – but it’s unlikely we’ll see any meaningful increase, or anything to worry about, as this leak suggests.

Via VideoCardz

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).