Ive been building my own edit rigs since like 2015 so Im usually pretty up to speed on what hardware works for Premiere and After Effects but man Ive hit a total wall lately. Ive been limping along on an old i7-9700K which has been fine for basic 1080p work and the occasional wedding video but I just landed a pretty big contract for a local non-profit documentary here in Chicago and the footage they sent is all 4K 10-bit 4:2:2 stuff from a Sony A7S III. My timeline is basically a slideshow right now even with proxies which is super frustrating. I know Quicksync is the big selling point for Intel when it comes to decoding that specific footage but I am hearing such conflicting stuff about the current lineup.

Initially I was looking at the i9-14900K because I thought just get the top of the line and be done with it for five years but then I started reading all those reports about the 13th and 14th gen stability issues and the power draw being insane. I dont really want to have to buy a nuclear power plant just to keep my CPU cool while Im color grading in Lumetri or running heavy noise reduction. Then some people are saying the i7-14700K is actually the sweet spot because of the extra E-cores compared to last gen but Im worried if Ill miss that extra cache on the i9 for the heavier renders in Media Encoder.

I have a budget of about $600 specifically for the processor and I need to get this build finished by the end of next month so I can actually meet my delivery deadlines. Is the 14th gen actually stable now with the latest BIOS updates or should I play it safe and look at something else? I really need that smooth scrubbing experience without waiting for frames to catch up every time I hit the spacebar.

What do you guys think is the most reliable Intel chip for heavy 4K h.265 workflows right now if you actually want a stable system...