Well that’s an odd, and I must say rather impolite response which presupposes quite a bit about my IT knowledge and what I want out of my kit, while simultaneously revealing your own ignorance.
i3, i5, i7 and i9 tell you nothing about motherboards, sockets or chipsets, they are marketing labels applied by Intel to denote CPU performance bands - “entry”, “budget”, “mid-tier” and “performance” - now replaced by “core ultra” 3, 5, 7 and 9.
Motherboard compatibility is determined by chipsets, there isn’t such a thing as an “i5” motherboard, new or old, all Intel motherboards will run all CPUs i3-i9 for their compatible generation(s). It is true that a motherboard with an i5 might well also have a more budget chipset - a 760 or 770 rather than a 790 say for 12th/13th/14th gen CPUs and so won’t be able to get the absolute best out of a “K” or “KS” part but it will work just fine otherwise.
As it happens the 14900K did not go in “an old i5 motherbard” but one with a Z790 chipset - which is the most capable chipset for 12th-14th gen.
Er, well, possibly because it will be faster in the motherboard that I already have.
Anyway - none of my complaint was about performance, it was about receiving fake or previously opened chips.
Here is the shot of what turned up.
The partial serial number on the chip itself is 05662 - checking against the batch code shows it corresponding to a tray i9-14900K but that the full serial number should be CM8071505094017; in fact the serial number coded on the 2D matrix is U5D50F4500978 - that should have a batch code of X508N897 though FWIW it is at least supposed to be a retail boxed part.
The fact that the partial serial number does not match the full serial number suggests the IHS could have been swapped - we can’t go from just a partial serial number to a CPU type but it’s probably a more budget i9. However it’s not just an IHS swap - the batch number and serial number on the IHS don’t match each other so they must be completely fabricated - or copied from genuine but different CPUs.
I generally am interested in building two types of intel system - performance systems for gaming, though there isn’t much point as I don’t get the time at all these day - my gaming system is still a 10th gen CPU - and low power systems such as my NAS which is the focus here. This has a very tight space for the motherboard (see previous photos) so hitherto I have used the “T” low power parts - currently it is an i7-12700T in a Z790 board.
As it happens I have two such boards. The previous Z690 m/b died so I ordered a replacement - which didn’t arrive. As this is my main file server and email server I didn’t want it offline longer than necessary so I bought another one. That turned up next day, a bit later the original made an appearance and through laziness as much as anything it wound up on the parts shelf rather than getting sent back. Always keep a spare!
Modern CPU’s can just be told to stick within a specific power budget so the question becomes - is the i9-14900K better when run at low power (~65W) than an i7-12700T. It’s complicated as there are trade offs - it has more E cores but no hyperthreading, generally does more IPC etc, so I haven’t quite decided if it is worth swapping.
If not I have a son who would love an excuse to claim the new CPU for his gaming rig - which is why, BTW why I tend to buy motherboards with chipsets which support overclocking. For one they also support underclocking and undervolting which the more budget chipsets don’t and second, I might need to repurpose them to a more performance-oriented scenario.
Nah. That is you can rent an AWS CPU for twenty quid a month but you aren’t getting cutting edge NPU enabled chips for that, you get a “Small EC2 Virtual Server”.
Yes, I can install it in the boards that I have, thanks.
But Ok the 15th gen “core ultra” 2xx CPUs are out. Why not get one of those - because a) they are more expensive b) apart from the NPU are not much more performant than 14th gen; they have lower boost clocks and no hyperthreading - the Core Ultra 9 is really very similar to the i9-14900K with same number of E and P cores, for instance and costs ~£600 rather than ~£400 c) need a new motherboard adding another £200-400.
At least both Z690/790 and Z890 are DDR5 - as will be the upcoming chipsets so for the moment I don’t need to buy more RAM (which is welcome as it costs the Earth at the minute).
But for now I don’t need cutting edge and don’t have much interest in running LLM’s locally (the performance boost for large neural models isn’t great anyway).
