Intel's upcoming Core i5-14450HX mobile CPU has been tested in Geekbench 5, and it's just as fast as the Core i5-13400 for desktops. The unreleased CPU refreshes the Core i5-13450HX, and both chips are based on the Raptor Lake architecture -- hence Raptor Lake refresh.
The Core i5-14450HX was benchmarked on a laptop made by Colorful, according to BenchLeaks, a brand primarily known for its desktop graphics cards. Geekbench reported the Colorful M15 24 was equipped with Nvidia's RTX 4050 6GB and 16GB of RAM. If the M15 is anything like the 13th Gen-powered X15, we can probably assume there's only a single stick of DDR5 clocked at 4,800MHz, which is undoubtedly frowned upon in gaming laptops.
Compared to the Geekbench 5 scores Tom's Hardware achieved in our Core i5-13400 review, the Core i5-14450HX performed just as well. The practically equal multi-core score strongly implies that the Core i5-14450HX operated with about or nearly the same TDP as a typical Core i5-13400. For comparison, the Core i5-13450HX can be configured with a slightly higher max power limit than the Core i5-13400. Still, we're probably seeing a roughly 130-watt power limit on this Core i5-14450HX, given it was a little slower. The lower score could have been caused by single-channel memory, however.
The Geekbench 5 result also tells us that the Core i5-14450HX peaked at 4.788 GHz, which implies a 4.8 GHz boost clock. This would be a 200 MHz improvement over the Core i5-13450HX -- and that's in line with most other Raptor Lake refresh chips. The increase in frequency will probably be most helpful in single-threaded situations rather than multi-threaded workloads.
As for gaming performance, it's hard to say how much of a difference an extra 200 MHz will make. Undoubtedly, the best thing Colorful could do to get the most out of Intel's Core i5-14450HX is to pair it with two sticks of DDR5 to get dual-channel bandwidth and maybe bump up the clock speed to Raptor Lake's default 5,600 MHz frequency for RAM.
It's hard to say when this 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh-powered laptop will come out. Still, considering that we've seen quite a few leaks for other 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh HX-series CPUs in the past couple of months, it seems likely that we're looking at a CES launch in early January. That's also likely when Intel will launch other Raptor Lake refresh CPUs for the desktop, including non-K and lower-end SKUs.
