Leaker suggests Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs could be underwhelming, especially the 14900K

Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs are about to be sprung on us, at least if the rumor of a mid-October launch is right, but one YouTube leaker is pouring some distinctly cold water on these next-gen desktop processors.

This is Moore's Law is Dead, who has produced another video on YouTube covering a whole bunch of topics, one of which is Raptor Lake Refresh.

The leaker has been chatting to his contacts recently, and to say there is a lack of excitement around Raptor Lake Refresh would be an understatement.

Some contacts at OEMs that Moore's Law is Dead has heard from already have the 14900K flagship, and one indicated that the chip was basically just a 13900KS with a new name slapped on it.

Another contact informed the leaker that it is a touch better than the 13900KS, but that it's nothing really noticeable (aside from having an improved memory controller that supports faster RAM).

There are worrying tales on the power usage front, too. One contact observed their 14900K chip going above 400W.

There are undoubtedly refinements here on the efficiency side of the equation, with better power consumption over Raptor Lake. But the problem seems to be that all of those advancements have been entirely spent on pushing clocks to achieve the necessary performance uptick expected from a next generation of silicon.

And in many cases, the performance uplift is pretty meager, as some past leaks have indicated (such as the one from MSI which suggested that on average, Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs will be 3% faster than current-gen processors).

Intel's silence on the next-gen chips, which barely even appeared at the recent Innovation event, also hints that the strides taken with the desktop processors are not particularly sizeable.

That doesn't mean that Raptor Lake Refresh will be a total washout, though, as some processors have meaningful upgrades, and may achieve some decent uplifts. The theory is we could see a 15% or so boost for multi-core with the 14700K (which does up the core count with an extra four efficiency cores), and the 14600K might be pretty solid too.

Of all the initial SKUs to be arriving in this initial launch, the 14900K sounds the weakest link, and certainly this latest video from Moore's Law is Dead does little to dispel that notion.

As ever, we shouldn't get carried away with rumors, but there's a good deal of weight around the theory that Raptor Lake Refresh is set to make only very modest headway with a number of models. And as mentioned, how quiet Intel has been about the 14th-generation of CPUs tells something of a story in itself.