Rethinking Performance: 5 Compelling Arguments for Skipping the Premium CPU

Key Takeaways

• Flagship CPUs are often overpriced compared to high-end and mid-range parts.
• Gaming and productivity benchmarks show that flagship CPUs only provide a slight performance advantage for a significantly higher price.
• Unless your CPU is crucial for your workflow, you don’t need a flagship CPU.

Flagship CPUs might be enticing, especially if you’re building a gaming PC and budget is not an issue, but the fact that they don’t offer enough of a performance jump compared to high-end parts to justify their price premium is just one of the reasons why you don’t need one.

1 Flagship CPUs Are Usually Overpriced

Flagship products are often overpriced for what they offer, and flagship CPUs aren’t any different. The situation isn’t as bad as in the GPU market, where the RTX 4090’s street price is ~70% higher than the RTX 4080 Super as of this writing, but it’s far from ideal.

For example, the mid-range Intel Core i5 14600K sports a list price of $300. The high-end Core i7-14700K will set you back $398, while the flagship Core i9 14900K costs $650. That’s less than a $100 price increase from a mid-range to a high-end part, and then $250 extra to enter the flagship tier. In other words, instead of just getting a 14700K, you need to pay 63% more for the bragging rights of owning a flagship Intel CPU.

The situation over at AMD’s side looks better, but is still not ideal. The Ryzen 7 7700X has a list price of $400, the Ryzen 9 7900X can be yours for $550, and the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X sells at $700. Do note that AMD often puts its CPUs on sale, so their street prices are usually lower.

That’s a $150 price increase between each of the three tiers, which looks kind of fair at first glance. However, when we take into account the differences in performance between flagship CPUs and their more affordable relatives, you’ll find that the former are overpriced for the level of performance they offer.

2 They Don’t Pack That Much More Performance Compared to High-End CPUs

Concerning gaming performance, you shouldn’t get a flagship CPU unless it’s for bragging rights. A recent gaming CPU roundup , courtesy of the Hardware Unboxed YouTube channel, shows that the 14900K gives you an average of six more frames per second in games at 1080p compared to the 14700K. That’s six more frames, or less than 4% extra performance, for a 63% higher price.

That’s at 1080p with an RTX 4090. Bump the resolution to 1440p or 4K and replace NVIDIA’s halo GPU with something like the RTX 4080 Super, and the difference would most likely be low enough to be considered a measurement error.

Over at AMD’s camp, the results are precisely the same. The 7950X has a six-frame advantage over the 7900X, which again translates to about 4% higher performance, but this time for “only” a 27% price increase. Things get much worse when we look at the 7700X, which manages to push only one frame less on average than the 7900X. This means you need to pay 75% more cash to get the 7950X and a ~4% performance bump over the 7700X.

On the other hand, if you look at the results of AMD’s X3D CPUs specialized for gaming, you can notice that the 7800X3D, the most affordable of the three X3D Zen 4 CPUs AMD currently sells, has easily beaten its pricier X3D cousins and every single Intel CPU. In other words, don’t even think about getting a flagship CPU if you want the best gaming performance. The 7800X3D, which you can often find for $400 or less, is by far the best CPU for PC gamers.

Things aren’t as grim for flagships regarding productivity performance, but they are still not great. The recent 14900KS review over at TechPowerUp compared Intel’s fastest and most power-hungry CPU against most of its contemporaries.

The results put the flagship CPUs from Intel and AMD in a better light compared to gaming benchmarks. However, you’ll still need to pay 63% more for around 10% faster performance in Cinebench R23 in the case of the 14900K vs. the 14700K, or a 30% performance bump if we’re talk about the 7950X vs. the 7900X.

In Blender, the 14900K is 12% faster than the 14700K, while the 7950X beats the 7900X by ~31%. Yet again, the results show that you don’t have any reason to get a 14900K over a 14700K.

Regarding AMD CPUs, though, the 7950X is noticeably faster than the 7900X, which marks the first instance where buying a flagship CPU over its high-end counterpart makes sense. But for most of us regular PC aficionados who don’t need a beastly workstation machine, that level of performance doesn’t make much sense anyway.

3 There’s a Good Chance You Don’t Need a Flagship Level of CPU Performance Anyway

If you’re a PC gamer or someone who doesn’t earn a living with the CPU inside your PC tower , you don’t need a flagship level of CPU performance.

In my case, aside from running games, my CPU doesn’t sweat much. I work in Google Docs , which can work without issues on any machine with a browser and internet connection that’s powerful enough to run Chrome OS without major slowdowns. I also occasionally use photo editing software such as Adobe Express or Paint 3D , two apps that certainly won’t benefit from a flagship CPU.

This is why I’ve decided that my next CPU will either be a still unannounced Zen 5 X3D part—probably the 9800X3D if AMD follows the naming scheme they’ve used for other X3D parts—or a 7800X3D if the Zen 5 performance improvements don’t wow me. At the end of the day, the only performance that interests me is gaming performance, and I won’t get more of it with a flagship CPU, X3D or not.

If you’re like me, an AMD X3D CPU is all you need. If you don’t play games nor use demanding PC apps, then even a mid-range CPU might be overkill for your needs.

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4 Intel Flagship CPUs Require Expensive Cooling Options

Aside from the flagship tax, getting a flagship CPU from Intel also means you’ll need to spend more on cooling. While a quality mid-range CPU air cooler is everything you need to keep any AMD Ryzen CPU at bay , Intel high-end CPUs can be pretty extremely power hungry, which makes them quite difficult to cool down.

If you get a 14900K and decide to run it without power limits, you will need a decent 280mm or 360mm AIO, even if you only plan to use it for gaming. But I wouldn’t recommend that because it looks like 13th and 14th-gen Intel CPUs suffer from serious issues , at least if we talk about high-end and flagship models.

5 A Flagship CPU Might Have Issues Not Found In More Affordable Models

In recent years, CPU and GPU vendors have been pushing their products, especially flagship ones, to their limits. This allows them to boost their clocks higher and higher as long as they have enough power and cooling headroom, making casual overclocking more or less dead . But this trend of pushing products to their limits out-of-the-box has gone too far.

For example, Intel’s 13th and 14th-generation high-end and flagship CPUs are experiencing all kinds of stability issues. While Intel had initially blamed its motherboard vendors, it’s now possible that the issue is with the CPUs themselves, considering that the crashes are happening even on data center motherboards, according to the Level1Techs YouTube channel , which do not apply aggressive power profiles to get the highest possible clocks. The issue seems to affect only the i7 and i9 models, with Intel’s mid-range i5 parts seemingly unaffected.

Then we’ve got the RTX 4090, which isn’t a CPU, but it’s worth noting that NVIDIA’s flagship GPU’s 450W TDP is too high for the poorly designed 12VHPWR connector, resulting in the connector melting and GPUs going out of commission . Worse still, the 12VHPWR connector issue persists nearly two years after the RTX 4090 hit the shelves. Interestingly, the connector is not causing trouble on the RTX 4080 and other NVIDIA RTX 4000 GPUs that come with it, all of which have noticeably lower TDPs than the RTX 4090.

What I’m saying is that flagship parts, be they CPUs or GPUs, can sometimes suffer from issues you won’t find on lower-tier products simply because manufacturers push their halo products too far.

Ultimately, I firmly believe that unless your CPU earns your wage, you shouldn’t consider getting a flagship CPU. They’re overpriced, don’t pack enough of a performance bump to justify their flagship tax, can be harder to rein in with anything besides chunky AIOs, and can give you headaches you won’t suffer from if you opt for a mid-range or high-end CPU. Unless you’re eyeing an Intel CPU, in which case you should avoid 13th and 14th gen Core i7 and Core i9 parts, at least until Intel releases its 15th gen Arrow Lake desktop CPUs later this year.