So I've been looking at upgrading my rig because my current setup is basically choking on 4K h.265 footage from my Sony A7SIII. I did some digging and everyone keeps pointing towards the 14th gen i7 or i9 because of Intel Quicksync. I was leaning towards the i9-14900K because, well, more cores is better for rendering right? But then I saw a bunch of benchmarks saying the i7-14700K is actually like 95% of the performance for way less money and it doesn't turn your room into a literal sauna.

My logic was that if I'm spending 20 hours a week in Premiere Pro for this documentary project I have due in October, I should just get the best. But I only have about 450 to 500 bucks max to spend on the CPU alone since I need to save some cash for more RAM too. I read that the i9 can be super unstable if you dont have a massive cooling setup which kinda scares me because I'm not exactly an expert at tuning bios settings.

Is the i9 actually worth the extra heat and price jump for 10-bit 4:2:2 scrubbing or would I be totally fine with the i7? Im also seeing stuff about the newer Ultra chips but honestly the naming is so confusing now I dont even know if they're out or if they're better for desktop stuff...