// TOM'S HARDWARE US — HARDWARE & GADGET
It's finally a good time to buy a Raptor Lake CPU during Prime Big Deals Day
After a year of wonkiness, Raptor Lake Refresh pricing is starting to drop.
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Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh (aka 14th Gen) CPUs have been tough to recommend over the past several months. Although you could find them readily available online, they almost never went on sale, often selling for above the prices we saw throughout the majority of last year. As Amazon's Big Deal Days event kicks off, Raptor Lake Refresh chips are finally seeing better prices, some of them hitting all-time lows.
Raptor Lake Refresh has remained a surprisingly relevant platform as DDR5 prices continue to push the cost of building a PC higher. Intel's 14th-Gen chips support DDR4 and DDR5, given you have a compatible motherboard, making them an easy upgrade path if you don't already have DDR5 memory. Keep in mind that DDR4 will give up about 13% of your gaming performance, however.
Earlier this year, Intel's Robert Hallock told Tom's Hardware Premium that Raptor Lake is a core part of Intel's strategy for "years to come," signaling a stabilization in prices and inventory. Hopefully that's what we're seeing in action now. The main Raptor Lake Refresh stack is on sale, with popular chips like the Core i7-14700KF hitting their lowest price ever.
Intel's 14th-Gen CPUs are still its fastest gaming chips, with the Core i9-14900K outclassing the newer Core Ultra 7 270K Plus based on the results in our CPU benchmark hierarchy. Although newer Arrow Lake CPUs are faster in applications, Raptor Lake Refresh still holds some of the best gaming performance for Team Blue.
The Intel Core i9-14900KF is a fully overclocked 24-core processor comes with eight performance and 16 efficiency cores, and is still one of the best Intel options if you're looking for a new gaming CPU.
Both the Core i9-14900K and Core i9-14900KF are on sale, but the KF version (unlocked without integrated graphics) is a particularly good deal. It's down to its lowest price ever at $369.99, beating the low it saw last year of around $391. The only difference between this chip and the Core i9-14900K is the integrated graphics. If that's a dealbreaker, the Core i9-14900K is on sale for $400 right now, too.
The Core i9-14900KF is Intel's fastest gaming CPU based on our test suite. It's also a potent chip in productivity applications with 24 cores split across 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores, with single-core boosts up to 6 GHz. If you end up picking up the 14900K (or any chip here), make sure you're using the latest BIOS for your motherboard to apply Intel's Raptor Lake degradation mitigations.
Score Intel's Core i7-14700KF, the same as the 14700K but without integrated graphics, with a $80 discount using code FTTF7678 at the checkout.