Intel announced its latest batch of CPUs for desktop PCs this week.

This is important because despite the increased performance, Intel has barely increased the price of these chips year over year, so you can buy these silicon for about the same price as a few years ago. They are also compatible with existing Intel 600 and 700 series motherboards, so there is no need to upgrade your motherboard.

Before discussing the new chips coming out this week and their prices, please note that these are not Intel's new 14th generation Meteor Lake chips that will be available in December. The chips being released this week are essentially a refreshed version of Intel's desktop Raptor Lake, which Intel also calls the 14th generation.

Since Intel is rolling out new Meteor Lake chips on December 14 and changing the branding in the process, we should expect to see the new "Intel Core Ultra" language when the Meteor Lake laptop chips debut This is a bit confusing as it has to be. This is because they will be built with a "chiplet" design that incorporates an all-new NPU (Neural Processing Unit) designed to excel in machine learning and other "AI" workloads. [However, the desktop CPUs Intel is announcing this week are not chiplet designs and do not incorporate NPUs; Intel is announcing six new chips priced from $294 to $589, and as you can see from the table below, there are essentially three to choose from.

The -F at the end means that these chips do not have Intel's UHD Graphics 770 integrated GPU built in, so a CPU in a gaming PC that already has a discrete GPU like the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000 series cards If you plan to install a CPU in a gaming PC that already has a discrete GPU, such as the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000 series cards, this is not a problem.

As you can see, the new high standard for Intel desktop CPUs is the Core i9-14900K. This chip costs nearly $600, but when overclocked using Intel's Thermal Velocity Boost technology, it can achieve speeds in excess of 6Ghz.

This is the successor to the Intel Core i9-13900KS, which was much talked about when it was released earlier in the year as the company's fastest CPU and the first Raptor Lake CPU to achieve 6Ghz. Since this CPU cost $699, its successor's price of $589 seems like a real bargain.

This is the biggest discount you will get with these new chips. For example, the new Core i5-14600K and Core i7-14700K both appear to be about $10 less than the initial price of their predecessors. This is especially exciting given that the new 14th generation Core i7 CPUs have 20 cores, an upgrade from the 14 cores found in the previous generation CPUs.

While these new desktop CPUS do not have the AI-focused NPUs that will be built into Intel's upcoming "Meteor Lake" batch of new laptop CPUs, some of these new 14th generation refresh chips have a little extra performance help with "AI."

As of October 2023, Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility (or XTU) has been updated to include a preview version of the new "AI assist" feature. This new AI Assist feature is a limited preview version and will only work with the new top-of-the-line Core i9-14900K and -KF chips, but Intel will add support for more systems in the future.

As for how it works, the "AI" bit seems to be based on the utility using what it has learned from scanning thousands of PCs and providing more customized recommendations on how to overclock your own rig. This data was gathered by scanning hundreds of configurations of various CPUs, motherboards, and other components, and we expect it to be a bit better than the basic overclocking that XTU already recommends.

Since the most notable thing Intel is doing with chips this year is likely to be a big switch to chiplets in December when the first Meteor Lake CPUs debut, this last-minute refresh of Raptor Lake desktop CPUs seems a bit uninspiring It may appear to be.

But if you've been considering a gaming PC upgrade, these chips come at a great time and a welcome price. While a high-end Core i9-14900K is rarely much cheaper than last year's model, it is generally the same price or less, which is great.

And if the price is still too high, the best deals this Black Friday are likely to be on the older 13th-generation CPUs, which Intel has raised the price on, partly because they have just been released.