I've had my 8700k running for over 7 years and it is time to upgrade. This will be mostly be used as a Plex server and a couple Windows 11 VMs.

I am trying to decide between the i7-14700K or i9-12900K, both are the same price as a bundle at Microcenter.

I wouldn't think there would be much difference between the two, with the i7-14700K just a tad faster? But of course there is that possible risk of the Intel 13/14 issue

Or should I just spend $50 more for the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K bundle for the better GPU? I won't see the need to upgrade for a while again, so I don't mind spending a little bit more.

Thank you

265K literally no contest. The Igpu is a real beast on that. For unraid they are amazing and excel with the productivity workloads. They are super easy to cool with a thermal right air cooler for 30 dollars.

Agreed on @Skandalus 's post. I started with a 12600K that I got for about 120 usd and it's a great CPU but it's a dead platform as well. I wanted little more raw power but seeing that 14xxx's cost the same as 265K (or more) I just sold my LGA1700 hardware and went straight to 265k for those sweet (and efficient) 20 Cores.

It really comes down to price also, not worth it to waste money on dead platforms, especially if iGPU on 265k is so much better (and has 20 cores)

This is an amazing thread, as I was looking at something similar. I currently have the following.

Motherboard: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ROG STRIX X570-E GAMING, Version Rev X.0x
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core @ 3800 MHz and the NVIDIA 1050ti GC.

The plan was to upgrade to either the new platform of ultra i7 265k or just get a new GPU, either the ARC B580 or RTX 4060ti, to encode all media to AV1 with either fileflows to unmanic, although i hear unmanic does not support AV1.. Main priority is space saving and maintan balance of qual

On 10/1/2025 at 6:57 AM, g4defender said:

This is an amazing thread, as I was looking at something similar. I currently have the following.

Motherboard: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ROG STRIX X570-E GAMING, Version Rev X.0x
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core @ 3800 MHz and the NVIDIA 1050ti GC.

The plan was to upgrade to either the new platform of ultra i7 265k or just get a new GPU, either the ARC B580 or RTX 4060ti, to encode all media to AV1 with either fileflows to unmanic, although i hear unmanic does not support AV1.. Main priority is space saving and maintan balance of qual

TBH, Intel has gotten a bad rep because of gaming but it's very good and efficient in home servers especially for Media servers (due to lower idle, great cpu/igpu transcoding). While I'm a big AMD fan of what they've done these past decade, I would NOT mount an AMD based UnRaid server. Any Intel Cpu with QSV will thrash any AMD CPU.

Now, the Arrow Lake Cpus (265k...) iGPU does AV1 encoding and decoding!