Heya, I’m a little bit of a noob, so i hope you can bear with me!
I need to buy a new pc, and Im really unsure which processor would be better.
The most demanding stuff I’ll be doing is probably gaming and digital illustration in photoshop (on large canvases with lots of detail, but both processors seem to be able to handle that fine), maybe a liiiittle bit of 3D modelling in the future for private use, but nothing crazy.

I can afford getting the I7, and I wouldnt mind the extra muscle just for the games to feel nice, and future-proofing (if that is even possible?), but I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about thermal throttling, specific cooling conditions, undervolting, overclocking, insane power consumption, and that’s made me very wary of how much management im gonna need to be doing for this thing. Like, if you cant cool it properly, its gonna fry the gpu over time. I’ve tried to educate myself a bit, but I honestly dont know what most of this stuff means.
On the other hand, from what I’ve been able to find, the I5 can perform basically almost as well as the I7 (for what I’m going to be needing), except its not as power-hungry and doesnt generate as much heat, so its easier to deal with, so maybe it’s not worth it to get the I7, but is the I5 a good investment if games begin to make more use of multi-cores in the future (something a friend told me)?

My options are restricted to either I5-14600KF or I7-14700KF, since thats what my manufactorer offers atm. Hope I can get some advice!
(dont know if it matters, the graphics card its going to get paired with is probably going to be something like GeForce RTX 4070, or 4070Ti)

Thanks beforehand!

  • Acrobatic_Assist_662@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Do you know what cooler will be in the pc?

    You’ll likely be fine with just about any 360 aio and any solid air cooler. Air coolers from noctua, thermalright, and deepcool seem to be go tos and will serve you well.

    Going into the bios and using a -100 mV undervolt will help you avoid most thermal throttling (tho unlikely unless you’re really hitting the cpu hard with the aforementioned coolers) and a similar setting in XTU will do the same.

    Undervolting will surely prevent all of your mentioned concerns, but you’ll also be fine without touching any of that as long as the cooler isn’t something rated lower than or just barely meeting the wattage of the cpu and, also, it’s not being stuffed into a sffpc or very small case with proper case airflow.

    TLDR; I’d recommend the i7 for overall peace of mind and performance and provided the base cooling isn’t being skimped or overlooked, you’ll be fine and happy.

  • DTA02@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I recommend the normal Ks rather than the KFs in case something happens with your Graphics Card at a random time in the future and you no longer get a visual on your display.

    Anyways, the 14700K will be more futureproof than the 14600K by a small margin but it won’t matter much however the extra cores on the 700 is a great deal in certain scenarios.

  • Barrdidnothingwrong@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    You would probably be very happy with either.

    Go with whatever you get the best deal on.

    For most users, you won’t be able to tell the difference.

  • ssuper2k@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    If you go 14700k, best get a 360 AIO

    For the 14600k/kf 240/280 should be fine