Intel's two latest flagships, the Core Ultra 9 285K and Core i9 14900K go head-to-head in 45 games to see how their performance stacks up. Can the 14900K hold steady, or will the Ultra 9 surprise us?
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K vs. Intel Core i9 14900K
- Thread starter Steve
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defaultname365
Posts: 102 +69
Good productivity CPU, but gaming is lacking. Not sure how Intel can keep up anymore in gaming terms when we have the 9800X3D beast.
yRaz
Posts: 7,324 +11,603
They're competing by offering OEMs nice bulk deals to throw their CPUs in pre-built machines. I don't think they're trying to compete with people who build their own machines. It's a fairly small market relative to everything else.
They needed to get their powerbudget under control so that it makes sense to start using their chips on laptops again.
These chips take 5-7 years to develop so they had an idea of what this was going to perform like going into the 13 series. This is just my opinion, but I think the reason that they decided to go with "power efficency" in their marketing is that the 14 series showed them the actual consequences of what happens when you just ram as much power as possible into a chip. You basically needed a 360mm water cooler to have any reasonable expectation of performance out of a 13 or 14 series i9.
Skjorn
Posts: 897 +744
You're behind by 3 BIOS updates on the Z890 Hero. Why even continue on with testing?
Eldrach
Posts: 225 +236
The bios doesn't offer much in terms of gaming performance - Mostly stability improvements.
The 285k just isn't a top notch gaming cpu - although it is quite good at everything else.
It's still weak of intel to not improve upon their previous generation for the first time in history.
Inthenstus
Posts: 224 +303
Yeah, but that only works for so long. I’ve stopped buying Intel chips years ago. Sooner or later it will start affecting retailers bottom line and they’ll start buying AMD only devices.
yRaz
Posts: 7,324 +11,603
not really. Intel doesn't make their money by selling a few hundred thousand i9's, they make it by selling tens of millions of prebuilts filled with i3's and i5s. While the highend is really cool and we all tend to focus on it, it has very little to do with the bottom line of many of these companies. nVidia is probably the exception to this rule. They've been selling entry level cards with a 100% markup for years now. When looking at this scale, AMD simply can't make enough CPUs to fill demand themselves. Intel isn't going anywhere anytime soon. AMD was behind intel for over a decade and they survived. Intel will make it through the next few years just fine
Eldrach
Posts: 225 +236
You say that - but their stock value tells the real story, their stock has plummeted after the release of the new generation of CPU's. It's not about OEM sales, it's about their reputation. When you have the top tier within anything - your reputation for making "the best" on the market will automatically spill onto your budget models as well - Which is how Nvidia is making the big bucks both in the gamer market and the AI market - AMD has equivalent models to the 4070, yet their models can't scratch the surface of the mid tier market - even though they are cheaper.
AMD needs a "killer card" to bring attention back to their GPU division - Intel needs a "killer cpu" to bring attention back to their CPU division.
Intel is even fumbling the ball completely next year in the OEM market. While AMD is coming out with 2 different CPU models, both with 50+ tops and Copilot+ certification - Intel will release Arrow lake as the successor to the current line up with only 15 tops - Then they'll charge over 100 dollars more for their lunarlake cpu, which is mostly the same cpu with a better NPU. AMD will destroy them on pricing - it's looking grim for Intel
yRaz
Posts: 7,324 +11,603
I bought the Intel dip. Stock price is driven first and foremost by fear and insecurity.
People seem to forget that intel owns their own fabs and that AMD is at the mercy of TSMC. AMD has to buy capacity on their nodes well in advanced, sometimes years. Apple buys all of the capacity on their newest nodes and then whats left gets divided between nVidia and AMD. it is far more likely that we will see a shortage of AMD chips than we will see Intel loosing massive amounts of market share to AMD. AMD very well may have the better chips, but Dell, HP, Lenovo. Well, they're in the business of selling COMPUTERS and they need chips to put in those computers.
The silicon industrial complex does not care about the opinions of gamers. So many more computers are sold to students, schools and business that gamers are little more than a footnote in those sales. High performing parts are good for marketing, but who are you marketing to? 90% of people who buy a computer just need it to run a web browser.
I often compare high end gaming parts to sports cars. The reason for that is many people need basic transportation to get to work. They need cheap economy cars, not Lamborghinis. Intel holds the means to produce many more economical computers than AMD. When all you're running is company apps inside a web browser, it doesn't matter if you get 20% more performance in ray tracing.
Everyone on here always says that if it's not peak gaming performance then the product is a failure in ever market category. Well, AMD can really on use their capacity to make high-end chips, same with nVidia. While Intels yields are lower, their costs are also lower because they own their own means to production. The thing that almost made AMD fail is likely the thing that saves Intel. We're probably 2 generations away from Intel being highly competitive again. Also, don't forget that AMD still has the bandwidth issue in their I/O dies that are only now starting to become a problem. AMD is leaving a lot of performance on the table due to the memory issues causes by their I/O dies. This is why we see such massive gains on the 3D chips.
The only fly in the ointment is that these Intel CPU's are built by TSMC as well. The stock price drop was mostly due to Intel dripping 20A, 18A is not ready yet, and they're farming out Arrow Lake and the GPU's to TSMC. It's going to be a year or two before we find out it they can start building their own chips again on competitive silicone. I hope they do make it, but nothing is certain.
yRaz
Posts: 7,324 +11,603
I knew their GPUs were and I was aware they were going to move some of their CPUs to TSMC, I did not know they did it already but I can't say I'm surprised. I did open a position in Intel so that's good to know. I don't expect them to turn everything around tomorrow or even next year, but there are lots of talented people working for them and I see a lot of their problems as a mismanagement of that talent. Short term, it is a good thing they went with TSMC, but they really need to nail down GAA on 18A. Many of their problems came from the fact that they expected GAA to be ready by now and they had to adjust a node that was originally designed to produce GAA chips to a FinFIT design.
Skjorn
Posts: 897 +744
Says right in the bios update notes it improves gaming performance.
No matter what Intel does, and how expensive CUDIMM you use, 285K will not beat 9800X3D overall in gaming. 9800X3D will remain the gaming king for 1½ years if not longer - Till Zen 6 3D comes out.
Good to see power usage dropped with Arrow Lake tho. 13th Gen and especially 14th Gen were horrrible here. I tried a 14900KS with a 360 AIO and without limiters, saw 500+ watt powerdraw in MT. That is just insane. KS model was a mistake.
Minimum fps on 9800X3D is great. And this is what matters the most, and it does not require expensive memory to do it. Just 6000/30 at 1:1 which is like 110-120 dollars for 32GB.
Cooling wise, low requirement too. Only problem is that 9800X3D is sold out everywhere and AMD can't meet demand, yet.
Demand is huge, because it is the undisputed king of gaming and still does great outside of gaming for most people, due to much higher clocks over 7800X3D + unlocked for OC.
7800X3D is still good for gaming, however don't really make sense right now, after price went up. I think it will vanish eventually. No point for AMD selling 7800X3D when 9800X3D exist.
For Intel fans, who only play games, I would rather buy something 13700K over anything "new"
i9 seems like a gimmick at this point. You are paying for e-cores only and TVB. Resulting in 1-2% better gaming perf over 13700K...
Good to see power usage dropped with Arrow Lake tho. 13th Gen and especially 14th Gen were horrrible here. I tried a 14900KS with a 360 AIO and without limiters, saw 500+ watt powerdraw in MT. That is just insane. KS model was a mistake.
Minimum fps on 9800X3D is great. And this is what matters the most, and it does not require expensive memory to do it. Just 6000/30 at 1:1 which is like 110-120 dollars for 32GB.
Cooling wise, low requirement too. Only problem is that 9800X3D is sold out everywhere and AMD can't meet demand, yet.
Demand is huge, because it is the undisputed king of gaming and still does great outside of gaming for most people, due to much higher clocks over 7800X3D + unlocked for OC.
7800X3D is still good for gaming, however don't really make sense right now, after price went up. I think it will vanish eventually. No point for AMD selling 7800X3D when 9800X3D exist.
For Intel fans, who only play games, I would rather buy something 13700K over anything "new"
i9 seems like a gimmick at this point. You are paying for e-cores only and TVB. Resulting in 1-2% better gaming perf over 13700K...
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if single-core performance on someone elses code is your stat of value.. then yeah. the core 285 isn't designed to be a gaming console..and id also wait til bios settles for final stats.
now if you have a regular use for 24 cores with gen5x4 nvme data and fast ram, oh man its a different story.
I'm sure any game running on a 285k with a 5090 I'd see as a binary YES, not a stat. and if there was bad perf there I put the blame on the developers! lol.. like what kind of unoptimized mess is this
GoldenGoat
Posts: 296 +309
So everyone thought manufacturing was Intel's problem, but the 285K is made by TSMC. So maybe manufacturing isn't really the problem?
After a week I got it to a point where there was 0 issues in a demanding workflow and all stress tests.. but its a tricky beast this early.
bios updates are either hit or big miss, the big xmp ram speeds on either cudimm or udimm only apply with 2 sticks, you have to plan your lanes out to take advantage of the gen5x4 data + gen5x16 gpu access, and gen5x4 nvme needs thought out cooling.
its all still early, 2 steps forward one back stuff at play.
Eldrach
Posts: 225 +236
Sure, but tests before and after the bios update shows the performance increase is minimal - some games that was totally broken are now better - but overall the cpu still falls behind the 14900k, which again falls behind the 9800 x3d - it’s not a bad cpu performance wise, but it is bad value compared to AMD atm.
Skjorn
Posts: 897 +744
I'm talking about testing you doofus. Idc who wins, test it right.
It's like testers finding the best ram kit to pair with a Ryzen cpu, test it, then take that same ram kit to an Intel test with zero consideration that it's not the best kit for that platform. It's just ignorance in practice. What's also ignorance is just too assume the update does nothing so why update.
I wouldn't really call AMD value at all. Motherboards are very expensive, x800X3D are $450+...soo value..no
yRaz
Posts: 7,324 +11,603
Some updates DECREASE performance in the name of security, which also should be tested. Updates going either way and one thing I do when I get new hardware is update all the firmware because, well, it's just good practice. Unless they are lazy and like to reuse old data rather than do proper testing.....
AMD has plenty of good value CPUs and motherboards too.
However, 9800X3D is not cheap, it is the best gaming CPU in the world with a huge demand. Obviously price won't be low anytime soon.
Days of AMD selling their CPUs for less than Intel is gone. Intel are the ones behind now. Has been true for a few generations now.
Go have a look at top seller CPU lists at Amazon etc. AMD all over Top 10.
If we could just get AMD to compete on GPUs too, then it would be great. Probably too much to ask for tho, for a CPU company.
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AMD was also near bankruptcy in 2015. Go check their stock prices in 2015/2016. I remember one dip was near $1 and there was talk of delisting AMD from the Nasdaq. But they recovered just fine under the right leadership.
Intel will come back when they find the right leadership. The government wouldn't allow a monopoly of the x86 CPU market to AMD the same way the wouldn't have allowed it for Intel.
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