Best balanced CPU - 14600K. If you want to go all out, get the 14900K.

Well what do you want out of your upgrade

13600K or 13700K, if you can find sales those are great. I got my 13700K for $280 a few weeks ago and skipped my planned 14700K.

14600K or 14700K if you can find sales, I’ve seen 14700K around $370ish but with tax it kind gets close to $400.

Check your FB marketplace/Craigslist or online forums, I have seen 13900K for $350 so they’re out there, most of those people are looking to “side” grade to 14900K lol

14th gen isn’t “bad” per say, it was how it was marketed and rather than just calling it say 13750K or something it was a generational number change that just added +4 e cores to the 14700K and a MHz bump for the rest. Still replaced the SKU for 13th gen and they gated APO to 14th gen only. So you can see people being upset.

You will see a little bit of performance boost compared to your current chip, primarily higher stock boost, slight IPC increase, added ecores, and more cache.

I have the 13600KF and it runs my 4090 sweet. 5.5ghz P-Cores 4.1 E-Cores. 13700K gives you a couple extra p-cores which may be nice to have later on.

Will you see a difference if you upgrade? Probably. But if you’re playing at 4K or 1440p high settings, the difference won’t really improve your overall experience all that much. Unless you just have money to burn, you’re better off waiting for 15th gen or later for a “true” upgrade.

If I was you and dead set on upgrading, the only thing I’d upgrade to is either the 13700k or 14700k since it has more P-cores which will help with gaming, but it probably will be negligible in most games at your resolution. The 13600k/13700k/14600k/14700k also comes with more e-cores (IIRC) but they won’t really make that big of an impact in gaming.

Honestly, I’d just OC the 12600k you have and call it a day if you’re gaming at 4k since you’re mostly going to be bottlenecked at the GPU.

Get the 14700K, it’s the refined endgame of this architecture, and it’s the only 14th gen that got more cores than its predecessor

wait 1 year for gen 15 release it will have a huge improvement over previous gen unlike 14th gen

7800x3d. I used to be die hard intel but this thing is admittedly a fucking monster of a chip.

I upgraded from a 12600K to a 14700K. I also have a 4080 (and the same case). Definitely worth it as it will allow you to get another 3-4 years use of your motherboard and RAM. And don’t believe all the negative reviews - the 14700K is a very good CPU especially if APO becomes more widespread.

No point without a 4090

14700k would be quite a jump. Or a 14900k if money isn’t an obstacle.

Don’t upgrade if you don’t need to. If you just really want to spend money, buy 14900k and/or do custom watercooling 😜

Just wait for something meaningfully better. I put a 13700k and now a 14700k in my system and frankly, if I hadn’t sold a pc to necessitate building another one, it was entirely a waste of time. Gained a few fps but spent like 3 days messing with clock speeds and voltage settings so it wouldn’t run at way-too-hot all the time.

In a MSI Z690 Force mobo. Enhanced core clocks off and LLC mode 3 or 4 (I forget atm) was necessary to get the cpu (14700k) to behave acceptably. This is on a 360AIO, too.

Old temps were high 20s at idle to low 40s in game. Initially I was 45 idle, 70-80s in game. Now it’s low 30s idle and mid-40s in game again.

That all said, if you find a smoking deal on a 13700k, sure, I DID notice some improvement in 1% lows (3440x1440, max settings when possible), but not worth all the BS.

If you have money and opportunity to find 13900ks why not