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Core i9 vs Core i5
THE CORE I5 HAS BEEN THE GO-TO FOR GAMERS FOR YEARS, BUT DOES THAT STILL HOLD TRUE?
INTEL’S 14TH GENERATION CPU launch has been, from a purely performancejumping perspective, a bit of a boring one. Whether that’s the lack of any actual hardware changes on the core of its lineup, or an underwhelming debut of its APO tech, it’s a launch that’s got a lot of us tech journalists really questioning why the company decided to launch the refresh when it did, particularly given the already potent CPUs it had in its arsenal.
That got us thinking.
Last issue, we built a gorgeous toptier gaming PC inside of the prestigious NZXT H9 Flow chassis, complete with all the best components we could find. The Core i9-14900K, the RTX 4090, a 1200W PSU, 32GB of DDR5, and a staggering $700 motherboard. It was, without a doubt, a bit of a monster. In 4K gaming it demolished everything we could throw at it, and when it came to benchmarking and real-world performance, there were simply no better alternatives out there at the time from AMD or Intel. If you wanted a versatile PC that could do everything from gaming to rendering, streaming and more, this was the machine.
The thing is, this was the very best hardware you could get, and frankly, if it couldn’t do that, and cost you a clean $3,800 in the process, you’d probably be fairly frustrated, for lack of a better word. What we mean by that is that this hardware is expected to perform at this level. It’s a given. If it didn’t, we’d be crying into our thermal paste. But what about the lower-end skus, the ones that the vast majority of us will buy? What if we wanted to save a bit of cash, and drop down a few skus? How much would that affect performance?
For a while now, the Core i5 has been seen as the workhorse of PC gaming. If all you wanted to do was frag scrubs in Battlefield or defeat the Deathwing in World of Warcraft with 20 of your best buds, the i5 was the way to go. Elevate yourself to 4K gaming? Well, GPUs couldn’t keep up with the frame rates, so CPU bottlenecks weren’t a thing.
We’ve come a long way since then. GPUs have improved leaps and bounds from generation to generation, certainly compared to their CPU siblings. So does the old adage still hold true? Is the Intel Core i5 ‘enough’?
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Hardware Picks
CPU $320
Intel Core i5-14600K
The Intel Core i5-14600K is the little brother in Team Blue’s 14th gen product stack (we’re yet to see a Core i3 make it to market just yet). That said, it still packs some serious punch on the performance side of things. By default, it comes with a total of 14 cores. Six of those are Intel’s Performance-cores, complete with hyper-threading, the
