We’re most likely just a couple of weeks away from the release date for the Intel Raptor Lake refresh, and while Intel itself hasn’t said much about it, interesting tidbits of information leak out pretty frequently. Today, we got a good look at what might be the pricing of almost the entire lineup. And it looks like price increases are coming, however minor they may be.
We expected that a price hike was likely for the Raptor Lake refresh, and that’s exactly what seems to be happening. As per a tip sent to VideoCardz, the majority of the 14th-Gen lineup appeared briefly at a Canadian retailer known as Canada Computers. While the CPUs weren’t listed, they could be found by searching for the product names, and that gives an idea of what to expect. Keep in mind that these prices are in Canadian dollars.
The best processor of the lineup, the Core i9-14900K, wasn’t listed, but the Core i9-14900KF was, with a $779 price tag. The next best thing, the Core i7-14700K, was priced at $589 Canadian dollars, translating to about $430 at the time of writing, while the KF version was supposed to cost $549. The Core i7-13700K currently retails for around $415 (USD). The store also inadvertently revealed the pricing of the Core i5-14600K — $449 Canadian dollars, and the Core i5-14600KF — $399 Canadian dollars.
All in all, we’re looking at price hikes ranging from 0% to around 7% across the entire lineup. The Core i9-14900K is likely to feature a similar price increase to the KF model, which costs 5% more in its 14th-Gen version.
Without knowing the exact specs for each processor, it’s hard to judge whether these price hikes are reasonable or not. They’re certainly not unexpected. However, as leaked benchmarks and official sources suggest, we’re also looking at a very small increase in performance. Some of the chips are said to be only 3% faster than their 13th-Gen counterparts. Moreover, there also don’t appear to be any changes to the core counts, apart from the Core i7-14700K, which is said to jump from eight to 12 Efficiency cores.
In other words, we’re looking at chips that are almost the same as their predecessors, priced a little bit higher. The difference in pricing will likely not be large enough to matter, although being this small, it might also make people that much less likely to buy 13th-Gen chips.
Switching the naming from 13th-Gen to 14th-Gen alone will get Intel some business, as these are entirely new products, after all. However, on the inside, not much is really new, and with AMD also offering some very competitive chips at similar (or lower) price ranges, Intel might really not make much of a splash with its Raptor Lake refresh after all.
