Where does a locked Core i9 14900 actually pull its weight for local AI when overclocking is off the table?

  For the non-overclocking crowd it is the steady helper behind a GPU: prompt prefill, embeddings, RAG chunking and GGUF quantization all ride on a 5.8GHz boost, with VNNI covering the INT8 path. The iGPU stays as an emergency display, and 24 cores/32 threads can even chew through a 7B quantized model alone — just do not measure its dual-channel DDR5 pace against a graphics card.

  Buy it when AI mostly keeps watch in the background while the machine does quiet day work. A 2GHz base clock says plainly that all 24 cores will not camp near 5.8GHz under load. The arithmetic flips here: the card renders tokens, this chip feeds it, and that division is where your money actually lands.