Clock Frequencies

The following chart shows how well the processor sustains its clock frequency and which boost clock speeds are achieved at various thread counts. This test uses a custom-coded application that mimics real-life performance—it is not a stress test like Prime95. Modern processors change their clocking behavior depending on the type of load, which is why we provide three plots with classic floating point math, SSE SIMD code, and modern AVX vector instructions. Each of the three test runs calculates the same result using the same algorithm, just with a different CPU instruction set.



The E-Core side of this chart (threads 17 to 20) can be somewhat misleading. It looks like the cores run at increasingly slower frequencies as the load goes up, but that's not the case. The frequency plotted is the average of all the P-Cores active, plus more and more E-Cores, which all run at a lower frequency than the P-Cores, which drags down the average.

That's why I tested E-Core frequency scaling separately in the chart below.

Overclocking

Overclocking the Core i5-14600K works really well. Thanks to its low base heat output you can feed it a lot of voltage to achieve higher clock frequencies. Setting the clocks is easy, thanks to the unlocked multiplier. I was able to increase voltage by +0.16 V, which let me run the CPU at an all-core multiplier of x57, with E-Cores ticking at x45. In this configuration, the 14600K can compete with the 14900K in low-threaded workloads and offers very compelling gaming performance.