Intel on Friday confirmed that it had increased prices of some of its consumer and server CPUs, citing market dynamics, rising costs, and soaring demand for these products. While select enthusiast processors increased from $30 to $50, data center-grade products increased by hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Intel is among many suppliers that have recently hiked prices of their products, citing increasing costs and demand that exceeds their supply.

"The recent pricing updates reflect current market dynamics, including rising supply chain costs and strong demand for our Intel Core Ultra 200S Plus processors," an Intel spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "These updates are in line with recent price increases for other Intel product families based on similar factors."

This week it turned out that Intel had quietly increased recommended customer prices (RCPs) of its latest Core Ultra 200-series Plus processors for desktops — the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and the Core Ultra 7 250K Plus — by $30 - $50, depending on the model. Both processors belong to the Arrow Lake family and, like the rest of them, are produced by TSMC. Yet, Intel's original 'non-Plus' Core Ultra 200-series processors did not increase their MSRP. The flagship Core Ultra 9 285K still carries a $599 RCP, just like it did at its launch in Q2 2024. Something similar applies to the least advanced Arrow Lake processor for desktops — the Core Ultra 5 225 — that has an RCP between $183 and $236, which is a bit lower than its launch RCP of $241.

If Intel did see supply-chain inflation, it would be reasonable to expect the company to adjust prices of the whole family. Instead, the company raised prices only on select products that apparently had become unexpectedly attractive to customers who can afford them and who have probably demonstrated willingness to buy them above recommended prices. This means that we are not dealing with a simple cost pass-through, but rather with a price hike associated with strong demand for specific SKUs.

When it comes to data center-oriented processors, we see rather massive price hikes. While higher-end Xeon 6 'Granite Rapids' CPUs cost less than they used to at launch in 2024, they are noticeably more expensive after Intel slashed their recommended prices in 2025, and they can be twofold higher when compared to retail prices from mid-2025. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that select Xeon 8000-series 'Emerald Rapids' processors now carry higher RCPs than they used to when they were released in late 2023.

All Intel Xeon processors are produced internally (so Intel cannot blame higher costs on TSMC), and while Intel gets raw materials from its partners, it is doubtful that overpriced photoresist can significantly affect RCPs of CPUs that sell for thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, Intel has been saying for several quarters now that demand for its Xeon processors exceeds supply. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense for Intel to finally capitalize on that and increase RCPs of popular models.

There is a caveat, though. Actual prices of data center hardware tend to differ from list prices as they depend on many factors, including volumes and strategic relations between suppliers and consumers. To that end, while it is evident that Intel has increased RCPs of its Xeon CPUs, it remains to be seen how this affects its average selling prices (ASPs) for the ongoing quarter and for the whole year.

Computex 2026 is well underway, and we’ve provided you with pre-show coverage and all the official announcements this week. You can catch our Day One coverage here and keep track of our dedicated Computex 2026 hub.

Intel acknowledges missteps with Arrow Lake

There’s no question that Intel failed to hit the mark with enthusiasts when it introduced Arrow Lake. Performance regression in games compared to previous-generation chips was the big downer for Arrow Lake, with Intel later blaming developers for not fully optimizing for the new architecture.

However, Intel is now laying it all on the table, saying that it needs to do better. “From an enthusiast perspective, it was... we needed to build back our reputation. I am sure you would agree with that, and this was, hey, [we’re] making sure we are providing value to the gamers, and we start with Arrow Lake Refresh, and we have a very strong roadmap to come,” Intel told us.

• Intel addresses Arrow Lake blunder: 'We needed to build back our reputation' — says Arrow Lake Refresh's low price a key first step, laying the groundwork for Nova Lake

Wi-Fi 8 is on the horizon, but Wi-Fi 7 is by no means going anywhere

Just when we are getting used to Wi-Fi 7 routers and prices have fallen to reasonable levels, Wi-Fi 8 is just around the corner. At the show, Asus revealed its first Wi-Fi 8 gaming router: the ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro. While the new router shares a design with the two-year-old ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro, it features a brand-new chipset that promises to offer vastly improved real-world performance over its Wi-Fi 7 predecessor.

And while Wi-Fi 8 was the talk of the show, MSI touted some high-end Wi-Fi 7 routers, including the RadiX BE19000. The tri-band router amazingly includes an internal PCIe SSD slot. This allows the router to serve as a NAS for file sharing and device backups. Also onboard are two 10 GbE ports and four 2.5 GbE ports.

• Asus unveils its first Wi-Fi 8 router
• MSI unveils latest set of WiFi 7 gaming routers touting ultra-fast speeds

Everything Else...

We can’t get into detail on everything we’ve seen so far at Computex in this wrap-up — we’ll let the individual news stories speak for themselves. Here’s everything else we’ve covered for Computex 2026 Day One:

• Cooler Master shows off new MWE Gold V4 Power supplies and GPU Shield adapter
• Microsoft debuts Surface RTX Spark Dev Box — Nvidia-powered mini-PC helps devs get ready for an agentic Windows
• Cherry XTRFY launches first 8K ultra-wideband gaming keyboardCorsair shows off gaming mouse with dedicated Stream Deck launch button
• Noctua's first AIO starts at around $250 for 240mm variant, features silent Asetek pump and NF-A12/A14 fans
• NZXT showcases H6 mid-tower chassis, new Ultra RGB fans, and a white H2 offering

Intel canned the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus from the Arrow Lake refresh lineup announced a few months ago, despite a swirling of leaks and rumors confirming its existence. The chip ultimately never came out, but a Chinese reviewer just got their hands on an engineering sample and put it through the wringer — the underwhelming results in games and professional apps show why Intel likely chose to keep it in the archives.

As a reminder, the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus would be based on the existing 285K, so it'd share the same 24-core config (8P+8E) but with slightly tuned clock speeds, DDR5-7200 support, and newer features such as Intel's binary optimization tool. That tool is actually one of the ways to confirm this 290K Plus was legit since it only supports Arrow Lake refresh silicon at the moment, and the BIOS recognized the CPU correctly.

Jumping to the tests, multi-core results in synthetic benchmarks were more impressive than the single-core numbers. The biggest win was seen in CPU-Z, where the 290K Plus was 2.84% faster than the 270K Plus. In Cinebench R24, the 290K Plus managed only a 0.69% higher score in the single-core test. On average across all synthetic workloads, the 290K Plus beat its lower-tier counterpart by only 1.5%.

Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus Benchmarks

In more intensive tasks such as compression, real-time rendering, and compiling, AMD's new Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 won in all but one test: Ansys Fluent Simulation. Here, the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus was 9.3% faster than AMD's offering and about 4.6% faster than the 270K Plus. Averaging out all the results, the 290K Plus was 6.3% faster than the 270K Plus but about 8.3% behind the 9950X3D2.

Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus Gaming Benchmarks

At 1080p, the average FPS improvement over the 270K Plus is about 2% across six titles. The biggest difference was in Delta Force, where the 290K Plus achieved 8.3% higher FPS and 3.33% better 1% lows. Both Black Myth: Wukong and Resident Evil 9 actually saw it lose to the 270K Plus by around 1%. The 9950X3D2, as you'd expect, bested either Intel offering with ease thanks to its massive cache pool.

Moving to 1440p gaming, the difference shrinks even more since the games become more GPU-reliant as you scale the resolution ladder. Delta Force once again exhibits the largest gap, about 6.8% ahead of the 270K Plus, and a surprising 14% ahead in 1% lows. The 290K Plus still falls 1% behind in Black Myth: Wukong while matching the 270K Plus in Resident Evil 9. On average, the unreleased flagship is 1.5% faster than the actual top-end Arrow Lake refresh CPU.

If we put all the numbers together, we get roughly 2% gains in gaming and almost 4% in productivity tasks, compared to the Core Ultra 270K Plus. Those slim margins would make it hard to justify a much higher price tag for a Core Ultra 9 SKU, which explains why Intel likely never released it. The chips that did come out are excellent value, so that a flagship offering might've thrown the whole lineup off-balance, especially in terms of optics.

Arrow Lake fell far short of expectations from gamers and enthusiasts. It was a one-two punch for Intel, not only falling short of AMD’s competition on the X3D front in games, but also barely matching the regular Zen 5 range in applications.

Now, Intel is trying to make a big impact with Arrow Lake Refresh. Intel has launched the Core Ultra 270K Plus and 250K Plus at competitive price points in an effort to regain some of the ground they lost with Arrow Lake, and both chips have earned a spot among the best CPUs for gaming.

Even with a big leap forward, AMD holds the cards on the gaming front. Chips like the Ryzen 7 9850X3D rule the roost, and even the last-gen Ryzen 7 7800X3D is holding its own. Intel is catching up quickly, however, especially with the 270K Plus, and without access to the massive cache available on X3D chips.

Is the Ryzen 7 7800X3D still fast enough to beat the newly-launched Core Ultra 7 270K Plus? Or should you go for the newer Intel chip for its productivity benefits and advanced architecture? That is what we are going to uncover in today’s faceoff by putting these two CPUs through a gauntlet of tests based on the data from our CPU benchmark hierarchy.

If you’d like to compare these chips more broadly, make sure to read our Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review and AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D review.

Features and Specifications: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D

Arrow Lake Refresh is more of an iterative update than a radical rethink. Under the hood, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus has the same architecture as the older Core Ultra 7 265K, with a few tweaks to the silicon. It is built using the same 3nm production process from TSMC, and contains 8 Lion Cove P-cores and 16 Skymont E-cores. The total count for the 270K Plus is 24 cores (8P+16E) and 24 threads in total, matching the higher-end 285K.

Intel also altered the clock speeds on the 270K Plus. The new chip can boost to 5.5 GHz on the P-Cores, with the E-Cores boosting to 4.7 GHz. Of course, you can manually overclock the CPU as well, given its unlocked multiplier. The bigger boost comes from uncore frequency, particularly in a 900 MHz boost in die-to-die frequency and a 400 MHz jump with the memory controller.

The 270K Plus has a total of 76MB of onboard cache, of which 36MB is L3 cache. It supports DDR5 memory at 7200 MT/s, and for connectivity, the 270K Plus provides 20 lanes of PCIe Gen 5. The power limits are the same as the standard Arrow Lake chips, with a TDP of 125W and an MTP of up to 250W. Socket compatibility is the same, so you can drop the 270K PLus into an 800-series motherboard with the LGA 1851 socket.

On the flip side, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D could not be more different on an architectural level. It is based on AMD’s Zen 4 architecture and built using TSMC’s 5nm process. It was launched in January of 2023 at $449, but it has seen some price cuts since then, with the chip now available around $375. The 7800X3D is compatible with the AM5 socket and 600-series chipset motherboards.

The 7800X3D is part of AMD’s X3D lineup of CPUs that employ 3D V-Cache technology. For this reason, it has a staggering 96MB of L3 cache compared to the 270K Plus’s 36MB. Unlike the 270K Plus, it does not feature a hybrid core layout, with just 8 cores and 16 threads without any division of P-cores and E-cores.

The chip can boost up to 5.0 GHz and has a base clock of 4.2 GHz. It also supports DDR5 memory exclusively, but has a lower rated speed at 5200 MT/s. AMD provides 24 PCIe Gen 5 lanes with the 7800X3D, along with integrated Radeon graphics. The TDP of the chip is 120W, and the PPT is set to 162W.

It is a bit difficult to compare the two CPUs based on specs alone when their underlying architectures are completely different. However, we can judge the metrics common to both, such as core count, clock speeds, and onboard cache. The only significant advantage that AMD brings to the table is its vast L3 cache; however, Intel pretty much wins in every other major category.

⭐ Winner: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

On paper, Intel puts up a better showing than AMD across several key categories, including core count, clock speeds, and memory support. The 7800X3D does have a few niche strengths, but they are not enough to win this round.

Gaming Benchmarks and Performance: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D

For this face-off, we tested both CPUs across 17 games spanning a variety of genres. This allowed us to get a good idea of how each CPU performs in gaming, and what its respective strengths and weaknesses are. We chose to test at 1080p with the RTX 5090 to avoid any GPU-imposed bottlenecks.

In our 17-game geomean, which averages performance across all our tested titles, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is the clear winner, with the Ultra 7 270K Plus a close second. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D leads the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus by 10.4% on average across all tested titles. The Ultra 7 270K Plus does well in this ranking compared to non-X3D Ryzen chips or its older Intel counterparts.

Staying on this chart and analyzing it a bit more, we can see that the Ryzen 7 7800X3D also leads the pack in 1% lows, which measures framerate stability and consistency of frametimes. It is a measure of how smooth your gameplay experience is likely to be, and the Ryzen 7 7800X3D leads the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus by 6.1% on average in 1% lows.

We get a better sense of the two CPUs' gaming prowess by looking at individual titles. On average, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D leads the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus by 8% in A Plague Tale: Requiem, 22% in Baldur’s Gate 3, and 5% in Cyberpunk 2077. Its biggest victories come in F1 2024 with a 34% lead, Final Fantasy XIV with a 24% lead, and Minecraft RT with a substantial 76% lead.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus also fights back in some titles, essentially tying the average FPS of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D in DOOM: The Dark Ages, Flight Simulator 24, Monster Hunter Wilds, Spider-Man 2, and The Last of Us Part 1. It also manages to flip the script in Hogwarts Legacy, with a nice 5.6% lead over the 7800X3D in average FPS due to that game’s support for Intel’s Binary Optimization Tool.

We also see some interesting frametime inconsistencies in some titles that paint the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus in a positive light. In A Plague Tale: Requiem, while being 8% behind on average FPS, the 270K Plus provides essentially identical 1% lows. The same can be seen in Baldur’s Gate 3, and it even manages to provide 6% better 1% lows in TES Oblivion Remastered, while having a slightly lower average score.

In our tests, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D drew an average of 70.5 watts while gaming. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is quite power hungry, as you might have gathered from our review, and it consumed 107.7 watts while gaming, a 52.7% worse result. This affects the efficiency numbers of the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus quite a bit, as seen in the FPS-per-watt figures. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is the efficiency king, leading the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus by 68% in FPS/W.

The value conversation is quite interesting, despite the 7800X3D’s better average performance and lower power draw. At the time of writing, it costs around $365, which is about 22% more than the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus. If we calculate the FPS-per-dollar figure, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus actually comes out on top, providing 10% better value than the 7800X3D.

This makes the comparison a bit more nuanced than it initially seems. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D offers better average gaming performance, and it may consume a bit less power, but the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus just has a better price-to-performance ratio. It comes down to the buyer's preference whether the additional price is worth paying.

⭐ Winner: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

Although the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus makes a strong case for itself with its excellent value proposition, it does still lose to the Ryzen 7 7800X3D in raw gaming performance, which is the focus in this round.

Productivity Performance: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D

The X3D processors from AMD have never been the best at application performance, and Intel has maintained its application performance while gaming slipped. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus pushes that idea further. It is a productivity monster at a competitive price. Therefore, our productivity test suite can serve as the proving ground for Intel to get back into the race. We tested both CPUs in a host of productivity benchmarks, both single-threaded and multi-threaded.

The difference in multithreaded performance comes mainly from the 270K Plus's superior core count. While the 7800X3D is a respectable last-gen chip with an 8-core, 16-thread configuration, it is simply no match for the 270K Plus's 24 total cores. On top of that, the Arrow Lake Refresh CPU has a more modern architecture, which can translate to even superior per-core performance.

We get a clearer picture of the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus’s dominance in multi-core scenarios when we look at individual benchmarks in more detail. In the Cinebench 2026 multi-core test, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus decimates the competition with a gigantic 122% lead over the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. We see a similar pattern in V-Ray 6 with a 117% lead, LuxMark CPU C++ with a 139% lead, and Blender Monster with a 116% performance uplift over the 7800X3D.

The 7800X3D makes up some ground in other benchmarks, such as DAV1D video decoding, where it trails the 270K Plus by 28%. It also lags behind the 270K Plus by only 4% in Adobe Premiere Pro RAW Codec processing, but these results are few and far between. For the most part, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is in a completely different realm than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

It is also important to look at per-thread performance to better understand how they perform on tasks that don’t scale well across multiple cores. In our single-threaded performance ranking geomean, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus still holds a substantial 29% lead over the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. We’re normally dealing in single-digit margins for single-threaded performance, so that’s a massive jump forward.

In Cinebench 2024’s single-core test, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus leads by 27% over the 7800X3D. The lead is 64% in POV-Ray’s single-core test, and it stays more-or-less in this range in all the single-threaded benchmarks we ran. Evidently, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is just a superior productivity chip and should be the clear choice in this budget if you want a multi-purpose CPU.

⭐ Winner: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus blows the competition out of the water with its excellent productivity performance on all fronts. It more than doubles the performance you get from the Ryzen 7 7800X3D across most workloads. While the power draw might be something to keep an eye on, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is the obvious pick for productivity-focused machines, even when compared against chips that cost hundreds more.

Overclocking: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D

AMD’s X3D CPUs on the Zen 4 platform are traditionally limited in overclocking capabilities. While they support Curve Optimizer and Precision Boost Overdrive 2, they do not have an unlocked multiplier, and the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is no exception. You can’t manually overclock it. You’re limited only to PBO, which is a powerful tool, but nowhere near as granular as what you can achieve with a manual, tuned overclock.

Intel’s Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs, on the other hand, are equipped with Intel’s latest overclocking features. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is a fully unlocked K-series SKU that can be tuned using various methods. The unlocked multiplier allows users to manually tune the CPU on a per-core basis, adjusting settings like voltage and power limits.

With the Core 200 Plus series, Intel introduced a feature called iBOT, or Intel’s Binary Optimization Tool. This feature can squeeze even more performance out of the CPU, acting as a translation layer that optimizes instructions to better leverage a particular architecture. It may not be like traditional “overclocking”, but you can’t say no to free performance. iBOT is still in its early stages, and although it holds a lot of promise, the feature alone isn’t winning Intel this round. The vast suite of overclocking features available to all Arrow Lake CPUs is what gives Team Blue the edge.

All in all, Intel’s Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is just more overclocking-friendly and offers way more performance-enhancing features. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is limited in its capabilities, and the first-generation 3D V-cache design creates several thermal challenges that make overclocking difficult.

⭐ Winner: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

The Ryzen 7 7800X3D has a locked multiplier and faces thermal challenges due to its 3D V-Cache, while the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is fully unlocked and offers some cool new performance-enhancing features. This round goes to Intel.

Power Consumption, Efficiency, and Cooling: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D

Intel has cranked all the knobs up to 11 with Arrow Lake Refresh, which means squeezing more performance at the cost of a big increase in power consumption. That’s the trend we see clearly in our power consumption benchmarks: the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus not only consumes more power on average than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, but also than the Core Ultra 9 285K.

Starting this round with idle power consumption, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus consumes 29 watts on average, the highest among the CPUs tested. It is 4 watts (or 13%) higher than the 25 watts consumed by the 7800X3D. In an active-idle scenario like YouTube playback, we see the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus pull further away from the stack. At 38 watts during this test, it is 35% more power-hungry than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D while running background tasks.

Moving on to more hard-hitting benchmarks that stress all cores and give us an idea of peak power consumption, we see the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus consume a staggering 175% more power than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D in Cinebench 2024’s multi-core render. The lead is 193% in HandBrake Power SVT_AV1 all-core test, and 219% in the y-cruncher multi-threaded AVX test.

We see similar margins in the HandBrake Power x264 test, where the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus consumes 187% more power than the 7800X3D. Power consumption increases by 137% in Blender Junkshop and by 182% in Linpack. The vast difference in power consumption gives us a clear idea of the sacrifices Arrow Lake Refresh had to make to achieve its superior performance.

The 270K Plus may be a power-hungry CPU, but raw power consumption figures don’t give us a good sense of the chip's overall efficiency. For that, we look at the watts-per-fps graph in HandBrake x265, where the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is 44.5% less efficient than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. Looking at watts-per-point in Cinebench 2024, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus again trails the Ryzen 7 7800X3D by 17.4% in efficiency. In Linpack, the 7800X3D provides 7% more GFLOPs per watt-hour than the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus. At least at the peak of power consumption, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is clearly less efficient.

While these results give us a good idea of which CPU is more efficient, a better way to visualize the disparity is through a scatter plot. These graphs plot performance against task energy, providing a visual sense of efficiency. In these graphs, the bottom-right corner is where the most efficient CPUs are located.

In the HandBrake x265 power efficiency scatter plot, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is located more towards the bottom left, while the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is farther to the right and higher. This means that while the 7800X3D consumes less power, it also delivers way less performance than the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus in this task.

The disparity is on full display in the Blender Classroom scatter plot, where the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and the Ryzen 7 7800X3D are almost on opposite ends of the chart. This visualizes the sheer difference in power consumption and performance between the two CPUs.

⭐ Winner: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

The Ryzen 7 7800X3D consumes less than half the power in most of our tests, and is more efficient in a few tests as well. While the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus has superior productivity performance, that is not enough for a victory in this round.

Pricing: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D

The pricing conversation surrounding the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is very interesting. At first glance, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is around $65 cheaper than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D at the time of writing. So, case closed, Intel wins, right? Well, not exactly. To judge the two CPUs fairly, we must consider the price of the entire platform.

Both the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and the Ryzen 7 7800X3D support only DDR5 memory, so this is not a factor that differentiates the two. At the time of this faceoff, the global DRAM shortage is in full swing, making DDR5 memory prohibitively expensive. A decent 32GB (16x2) DDR5 kit at 6000 MT/s CL36 costs about $350-400 right now, which is a bit ridiculous. However, the important thing is that this factor cancels out between the two CPUs we are comparing.

Since we have an unlocked K-series SKU in the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, we need a Z890 motherboard to fully utilize this CPU. A basic Z890 motherboard can be had for around $200-300, but you can even go with more feature-rich options that can run you north of $600.

On the flip side, the AMD X670E motherboards are slightly more affordable while providing a similar feature set. These boards can start as low as $150, but you should go for a more reasonable option at $200-250 to avoid missing out on key features. However, you can also get a B650 motherboard and save an extra $50-100, depending on the model. AMD supports overclocking on B-series chipsets, and since you can’t manually overclock the 7800X3D anyway, you don’t need to spring for a high-end board.

We must also consider the cooling differences between the two CPUs. Given its higher power draw, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus needs a beefier cooling solution. A dual-tower air cooler ($100-120) or a 360mm AiO liquid cooler ($150-250) is more appropriate for the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, while the Ryzen 7 7800X3D can be paired with a 240mm AIO ($80-150) without any significant issues. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus isn’t as power-hungry as something like the Core i9-14900K, so you don’t need to resort to top-shelf cooling.

A key point in AMD's favor in this scenario is its platform longevity. The AM5 platform is here to stay, as AMD has confirmed, and it plans to support this socket at least through 2027. Intel, on the other hand, has made no such promises, and with Nova Lake-S just around the corner, the LGA 1851 socket seems to be on its last legs.

This makes the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus essentially a dead-end platform. You can choose the Ryzen 7 7800X3D on an X670 motherboard, and then easily upgrade to a Zen 6 CPU in the future without changing your motherboard or RAM. This does not look likely on Intel’s platform, which diminishes its overall value proposition.

Putting all these factors together, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D offers better value overall, despite a slightly higher sticker price at the time of writing. Its motherboards are cheaper, it can run comfortably with lower-cost cooling solutions, and it offers a better path for future upgrades. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is a fantastic choice, but it carries with it the baggage of the LGA 1851 socket.

⭐ Winner: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

The Ryzen 7 7800X3D might be a bit more expensive up front, but its lower platform costs and better upgrade potential give it the edge in this round.

Bottom Line: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D

After our rounds, it's a tie between the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus. Both are excellent CPUs, and the choice between them really comes down to your use case. That means crowning a winner here is up to you, but keep in mind that the choice could flip if you use particular applications.

Overall, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is our winner. That's because it trades a touch of gaming performance for application performance that leapfrogs not only the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, but also most of AMD's Zen 5 lineup. It's a balanced CPU, offering excellent performance in productivity apps and games in equal stride.

The Ryzen 7 7800X3D, on the other hand, is specialized. It's squarely focused on gaming, and if that's all you're concerned about, it's the clear winner. Not only do you get in edge in frame rates, you also gain the advantage of the AM5 platform and future upgrade potential.

⭐ Winner: Tie

More CPU Faceoffs

• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X vs Intel Core i9-14900K
• Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 9700X
• AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D vs Intel Core i9-14900K
• AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D vs Ryzen 7 9800X3D

CPU reviews aren’t made equally. They should, and do, follow the same process. I double-check everything on the test bed is the same, run a gauntlet of benchmarks using the same software stack and OS configuration, and spit the results out into various spreadsheets to eventually turn that raw data into hundreds of graphs for you to peruse. But the ups and downs during that process can vary wildly, and I was caught on the extreme end of that variation with Intel’s new Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus.

Blindly running benchmarks and throwing the data into a chart is a quick way to come to bunk conclusions. PCs and benchmarks aren’t perfect, and when you run as many benchmarks as we do here at Tom’s Hardware, it’s inevitable that you’ll encounter some strange results. The challenge with Intel's 270K Plus and 250K Plus was that those strange, unbelievable results were actually representative of the real performance of the chips. I spent no less than 50 hours (and probably more) simply rerunning benchmarks on various CPUs because I didn’t believe the results I was seeing.

That’s the best compliment I can give Intel’s small but potent range of Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs. There are still problems with them, and I want to make that clear lest this devolves into some marketing slop about unbelievable benchmark results. But the fact remains that I spent a lot of extra time sanity checking, because the performance was so impressive, and that’s worth closer examination.

The launch dust has settled on the 270K Plus and 250K Plus. The comparisons are in and the conclusion is clear: Intel made some compelling, value-oriented CPUs. Here, I’m going to take you behind the scenes of the testing process, as well as break down why these two CPUs are so important for Intel.

Arrow Lake is difficult to benchmark

There’s no other way to put it: Arrow Lake is annoying to benchmark. To avoid massive retests hours before a review embargo lifts, I’m constantly checking results against other data I’ve gathered to make sure my testing is on track. It’s much easier to quickly rerun a test with an odd result than it is to realize your data is off after you’ve already gone through a dozen CPUs. These checkpoints are even more important when working under an NDA. You’re working in a vacuum, bound contractually not to compare your results with other reviewers.

In generations past, it was pretty easy to know if you could trust the data you were seeing, but not with Arrow Lake. Even when the first CPUs rolled out, Intel made it clear that there would be performance regressions in some workloads. Further, there are still some workloads that do not play nicely with Intel’s Arrow Lake’s SoC-like CPU architecture.

Overall, the 270K Plus is about as fast as the Core i9-14900K and 2.4% faster than the Ryzen 7 9700X in games at 1080p. But in Minecraft, the Ryzen 7 9700X is nearly 50% faster. There are reasons why Arrow Lake chips perform poorly in this particular game: namely, how the maximum render chunk distance stresses the memory chain throughout your system, but the reasons aren’t important. When working in a vacuum, it’s hard to take these extreme outliers at face value.

That’s true at the other end of the spectrum, as well. Even looking at the multithreaded performance geomean, there’s reason to doubt the results. Am I supposed to believe that the 270K Plus is nearly 8% faster than the Core Ultra 9 285K, despite costing half the price and coming with a reduction in peak clock speed? Again, there are reasons for this discrepancy — in this case, a massive boost in die-to-die frequency — but these kinds of results pop up everywhere with Arrow Lake CPUs. You can come up with a technical explanation for a few odd results, but expand that over dozens of (what would otherwise be) outliers, and it gets difficult to trust you actually gathered the right data.

In fairness, this isn’t a problem specific to Arrow Lake, but it is a problem specific to any radical architecture shift. We just don’t see radical architecture shifts often. AMD has been building on the foundation of Zen for nearly a decade, and although Intel shook things up with Alder Lake and its hybrid architecture, it took a similar approach to what we saw in the 14nm days by pushing clocks and power as far as they could go. Arrow Lake completely threw a wrench in the system by not only featuring a hybrid core architecture, but also a disaggregated design and the elimination of Hyperthreading.

The difficulty comes up not in evaluating discrepancies, but rather in how big those discrepancies should be. It’s one thing to say that the Core Ultra 5 245K isn’t a very good gaming CPU. It’s another to say that it’s 7.5% slower, and not 10% or even 15% slower, than AMD’s Ryzen 5 9600X in games at 1080p. That is the challenge when reviewing Arrow Lake, and it’s a challenge I ran up against when evaluating the 270K Plus and 250K Plus.

Rerunning the test benches

After it was all said and done, I ended up retesting the entire Arrow Lake stack, short of the Core Ultra 5 225, which wasn’t included as part of my test pool. I rerun benchmarks all the time; that isn’t unique. But with the 250K Plus and 270K Plus, I reran the full suite of tests for each chip. That’s somewhere between 10 and 12 hours of testing per CPU for applications, an additional two to three hours for power testing, and another few hours for game testing. In other words, a full retest isn’t something I resort to lightly.

I had tested the main Arrow Lake stack prior to the 270K Plus and 250K Plus showing up on my doorstep. I use a frozen test image, so gathering that data early gave me some time when the CPUs showed up to deal with any anomalies. After they arrived and I ran my tests, that’s when the reality of retesting started to set in. Seeing multithreaded performance with the 270K Plus that outdid the 285K set off alarm bells. Especially in applications, both CPUs were handily beating chips that cost twice as much without batting an eye.

First, I started with the raw comparison points, retesting the 265K and 245K, and looking at the uplifts with their Arrow Lake Refresh counterparts using Intel’s data as a reference point. The results were the same. I then expanded up to the 285K and threw games into the mix. The results were the same. By the end of the gauntlet, I realized that the performance was so impressive that it made me doubt the reliability of a benchmark suite that’s been refined over the course of decades of CPU testing here at Tom’s Hardware.

A lot of that doubt comes down to how Intel positioned the 270K Plus and 250K Plus. We’re talking about a $300 and $200 CPU, respectively, and although prices have trended upward since release, they’re still value-focused, midrange chips, based on pricing. Based on performance, they’re a tier above what their prices would suggest and probably $100 cheaper than what the market demands.

It’s a radical departure for Intel. Since the dying days of 14nm, we’ve seen Intel slowly cede ground to AMD. But prices have slipped. Last-gen CPUs have become more viable from a value perspective, and Intel hasn’t been able to adequately address the gaming crowd with an X3D competitor. That all came to a head with the original launch of Arrow Lake. Intel was still postulating that it could counter AMD’s offerings point-for-point, but the data just didn’t back that up. We were left in a situation where Intel’s chips were so undesirable that CPUs that were two generations old were selling for more than the shiny new Arrow Lake options.

Intel needed a reset, both on pricing and messaging, to signal to buyers that although AMD dominates at the high-end, Team Blue can still deliver a lot of value around midrange price points. And the 270K Plus and 250K Plus are an aggressive reset. They deliver in an area that’s largely been ignored by AMD as it pushes out endless X3D variations, and the slightly elevated prices of Arrow Lake Refresh chips are a signal that Intel’s new position is paying off.

The question, and my concern, is how long this will last. It’s one thing to sell off silicon on a fire sale to make up for a lacking generation of chips. It’s another to commit to a new position in the consumer CPU market, especially after decades of being the top dog.

The Arrow Lake reset — and looking toward Nova Lake

Arrow Lake Refresh alone isn’t enough for Intel to turn things around on the consumer front. Let’s not be shortsighted. They’re great chips, and easy to recommend in a value-oriented build, but there’s a reason not a single Intel chip appears in the top 10 of Amazon’s CPU best sellers, and why its chips only occupy five of the top 25 slots. We can look at best-seller lists, region or retailer-specific data, or even the Steam hardware survey. But anyone who builds PCs and is around those who are building PCs doesn’t need to look far to see that you go with an AMD chip more often than not.

Intel can’t overcome that level of mind share with two CPUs, especially not two CPUs that still only manage to match AMD’s non-X3D offerings in gaming performance. What it can do is set the tone for Nova Lake.

One consistent thread throughout reviews of the 270K Plus and 250K Plus — and one I particularly harped on in my reviews — is the LGA 1851 socket. It’s a dead end. Intel hasn’t outright confirmed we won’t see another chip using this socket, but I’d be shocked if we did. And unlike sending out a long-lived platform on a high note, as we saw with AM4 and the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, LGA 1851 barely saw the light of day with the disappointing reception of the original Arrow Lake chips.

Regardless if you upgrade your CPU every generation or wait for a new memory standard to finally make a platform swap, socket longevity is important. It’s not just about if you’ll upgrade to a new CPU; it’s about having the option to upgrade. It’s why you buy a motherboard with four M.2 slots even if you’ll never fill them. It’s why an ATX board comes with four DIMM slots despite the fact that most builders will only occupy two. The option to upgrade your CPU is powerful, even if you’ll never do it. Buy into an AM5 platform, and you can go further in the future. Buy into an LGA 1851 platform, and you’re already restricting yourself to a full motherboard and CPU swap down the line. This shouldn’t be your only consideration when choosing a CPU, but these types of differences can sway a buying decision when other differentiators are exhausted.

Intel, I suspect, is aware of this. We don’t know if the LGA 1954 socket that Nova Lake chips will use will continue forward for multiple generations, but it’s a lot easier to buy into a platform that’s just rolling out than one that already has a foot out the door. The stance Intel is taking with the 270K Plus and 250K Plus, situating itself as a value-oriented alternative that punches above its price tag, has to extend beyond these two CPUs, onto a platform that future-looking buyers are willing to invest in.

That’s what I’m looking for with Nova Lake. We have big rumors about Intel’s X3D competitor, supposedly called bLLC, and speculation about a 44-core flagship. That’s great, and I’m sure there will be fireworks between AMD and Intel at the high-end. It’s these chips like the 270K Plus and 250K Plus, however, where Intel needs to take ground. Arrow Lake Refresh is resounding proof that it can occupy that space. Let’s just hope Intel doesn’t change its mind again.

Intel’s Arrow Lake platform was a huge disappointment at launch. It barely managed to compete with its predecessor, Raptor Lake Refresh, in gaming performance, all while AMD’s X3D CPUs continued to dominate the rankings among the best CPUs for gaming. Intel responded with heavy price cuts, but the situation was too far gone by then.

Now, we have a new challenger. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus has launched at a remarkable $300 price point, $100 cheaper than what the Core Ultra 7 265K launched at, all while showing big increases in gaming and productivity performance. Intel is trying (maybe desperately) to regain the ground it lost with the original Arrow Lake and succeeding.

Its competitor for today’s faceoff is the Ryzen 7 9700X. Although on paper it has a lot fewer cores than the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, it is in the same price bracket as the Intel chip. This is a purchase decision potential buyers may face when they have $300-$350 to spend on a new CPU.

Let’s run these two CPUs through our rigorous six-round gauntlet to determine which CPU is truly the best, and if Intel has made a successful attempt at redemption.

Features and Specifications: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 9700X

Under the hood, Arrow Lake Refresh is exactly what it sounds like. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is based on the same microarchitecture as the 265K, built using TSMC’s 3nm process. Intel has provided 24 total cores in the 270K Plus, split into 8 Lion Core P-cores and 16 Skymont E-cores. There is only one thread per core across all Arrow Lake CPUs, bringing the total thread count to 24.

Intel claims that the 270K Plus is not just a better binned Arrow Lake CPU, but rather a new wafer and product code. Nevertheless, the main difference between the 270K Plus and the 265K is the clock speed. The Core Ultra 7 270K can climb up to 5.4 GHz on the P-cores, while the E-cores can boost up to 4.7 GHz. Being a K-series SKU, the multiplier is unlocked, giving you full access to overclocking.

Core clocks aren’t too different, but uncore clocks have shifted a lot. Intel increased the die-to-die frequency by 900 MHz compared to stock Arrow Lake chips, as well as bumped the fabric frequency by 400 MHz.

The chip also supports DDR5 memory at 7200 MT/s and 20 lanes of PCIe Gen 5. There is a total of 76MB of cache on the chip, with 36MB of that being L3 cache. Intel has kept the same power limits for the 270K Plus as the previous Ultra 7 CPUs, with a TDP of 125W and MTP boosting to 250W. The CPU uses the same Intel LGA 1851 socket and is compatible with existing 800-series Intel motherboards.

Its competitor, the Ryzen 7 9700X, is also no slouch on the spec sheet. Based on the Zen 5 architecture and built on TSMC’s 4nm production process, the Ryzen 7 9700X is compatible with the AM5 socket and existing 800-series AMD motherboards. It uses AMD’s chiplet-based design with core complexes, which has been very successful in previous Ryzen CPUs.

The 9700X has 8 cores and 16 threads, with no P-core and E-core split. The CPU supports DDR5 memory at 5600 MT/s and provides 24 PCIe Gen 5 lanes. Although it does not have the ridiculous amount of L3 cache as its X3D siblings, it still has a respectable total of 36MB. AMD markets the 9700X with a TDP of 65W and an extended TDP of 105W.

The boost clock of the Ryzen 7 9700X is 5.5 GHz, which is exactly the same as the maximum turbo boost of the 270K Plus. All AMD Ryzen CPUs are unlocked, so you can overclock the Ryzen 7 9700X as well.

Comparing the two CPUs on paper is a bit complicated since their architectures and core layouts are so different. Intel clearly has the superior core/thread count and a slightly more modern underlying architecture. The clock speeds are very similar, but Intel supports higher-speed memory as standard. On the flip side, Intel has much higher power draw ratings.

⭐ Winner: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

While it is not possible to say which CPU is better just by looking at specs on paper, Intel clearly puts up a better showing in this round. The 9700X does provide more PCIe lanes and a lower TDP, but Intel wins out in almost all other categories.

Gaming Benchmarks and Performance: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 9700X

We ran both CPUs through a gauntlet of games across a wide variety of genres to get a good idea of average performance. The 1080p resolution was chosen since it maximizes the CPU usage and allows us to see the difference between the two chips. We also used the GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card to minimize GPU bottlenecks. You can read our individual reviews of both the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and the Ryzen 7 9700X to get a more in-depth analysis.

Kicking things off with our 17-game 1080p performance geomean, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus puts out an average FPS score of 162.2, leading the Ryzen 7 9700X’s average score by 2.4%. The gap between the two CPUs is slightly larger when looking at 1% lows. In our geomean, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus scores 6.1% better 1% lows than the Ryzen 7 9700X. So far, so good for Intel.

Looking at individual benchmarks tells an interesting story. In A Plague Tale: Requiem at 1080p, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus actually trails the Ryzen 7 9700X by 3.2% on average. However, the 1% low numbers are flipped, as the Core Ultra 7 270K actually has a 14% better result in this particular title. The trend returns to normalcy in Cyberpunk 2077, where the Core Ultra 7 270K is 8% faster in both average FPS and 1% low results.

Elsewhere, we saw wins for the Ryzen 7 9700X, including in F1 2024, where it leads by a noticeable 13% on average. The 9700X also crushed it in Minecraft, leading by 33% in average FPS. However, both CPUs were tied in 1% low results at exactly 57 FPS, which is a peculiar result. Arrow Lake CPUs broadly don’t play nicely with Minecraft with a maximum render chunk distance of 96.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus also saw some big wins. In Hitman 3, the new Intel chip scored a 13% lead over the Ryzen 7 9700X, while also being 7% faster in 1% lows. Hogwarts Legacy also favored Intel heavily, leading to a 12.4% better average FPS result for the 270K Plus in this game. Both of these games support Intel’s new iBOT feature, which improves gaming performance in select titles.

It is safe to say that the two CPUs trade blows when it comes purely to gaming performance. We also saw some results that were essentially tied, such as Monster Hunter Wilds, Final Fantasy XIV, TES Oblivion Remastered, and Baldur’s Gate 3. However, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus slightly edges the Ryzen 7 9700X, delivering 2-3% better average gaming performance.

While gaming, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus drew 107.7W, which is a big bump over the Core Ultra 7 265K. It is also 18% higher than the Ryzen 7 9700X, which drew an average of 87.8W while gaming. However, when we look at efficiency numbers calculated in FPS/W, the new Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is still 2.6% more efficient while gaming than the Ryzen 7 9700X. The temperatures of the two CPUs were not significantly different in our testing.

Intel has launched the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus at a very competitive $300 price point, and that favors it quite well in the value conversation. Calculating the value using FPS-per-dollar, the Intel CPU edges out the Ryzen chip by 5.5%. The $10 price premium of the Ryzen 7 9700X, combined with its marginally lower gaming performance, makes it a slightly worse value compared with the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus.

⭐ Winner: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

Intel’s new CPU puts up an impressive showing in the gaming round of this faceoff. While the advantages are marginal, it provides slightly better gaming performance than the Ryzen 7 9700X at a lower price, though it consumes a bit more power.

Productivity Performance: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 9700X

We also put the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus through its paces against the Ryzen 7 9700X in a series of productivity tasks. These tests cover both single-threaded and multi-threaded applications to give us a good idea of the general performance level of the two CPUs. While the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus clearly has way more cores, the comparison makes sense since both CPUs are very similar in price at the time of writing.

We have a huge result for the new Core Ultra 7 270K Plus right off the bat when we look at our multithreaded performance ranking geomean. The Ultra 7 270K Plus delivers chart-topping multi-core performance in our testing, and leaves the Ryzen 7 9700X in the dust. Comparing the geomeans, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is a whopping 77% better than the Ryzen 7 9700X in our multi-core tests on average. That is almost double the productivity performance.

Looking at individual benchmark results, we see the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus take a gigantic 90% lead over the Ryzen 7 9700X in the Cinebench 2024 multi-core test. The POV-Ray test isn’t much better for the Red Team, as the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus has a staggering 127% higher score in this test. The lead is 74% in Blender Junkshop, 92% in V-Ray 6, and 73% in HandBrake x265 10-bit encoding test. You get the idea.

The driving force behind Intel’s dominance in this round is the superior core/thread count of the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus. While the Ryzen 7 9700X is quite a competent 8-core, 16-thread CPU, its core layout pales in comparison to the 24-core, 24-thread 270K Plus. You can argue that the 16 E-cores don’t really contribute a lot in performance, but you can’t really bet against raw core count when it comes to multithreaded productivity performance.

Single-threaded performance also follows the same trend, though the differences are much less dramatic this time around. Our single-threaded performance ranking geomean still has the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus at the top of the pile, with an average 10% higher score than the Ryzen 7 9700X. It also improves upon the Core Ultra 7 265K by about 3.3%, which is a welcome bump in single-threaded performance.

Cinebench 2024’s single-core test puts the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus ahead of the Ryzen 7 9700X by 5.4%, while Cinebench 2026 sees the lead grow to about 7.8%. In the Lame Extended single-thread audio encoder, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus was about 3% faster than the Ryzen 7 9700X to deliver the finished file. The POV-Ray chart shows the Intel CPU pulling ahead by a much larger margin of 36.2%, but that result seems to be more of an outlier.

With a standout lead in both multi-core and single-core performance, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus should be the clear choice for consumers who are looking to use their PCs for both gaming and productivity. Frankly, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus gives much more expensive CPUs in this category a tough time, making it an excellent value for productivity.

⭐ Winner: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

Thanks to its superior core count, the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus absolutely dominates the Ryzen 7 9700X in our productivity benchmarks, taking home this round by a landslide.

Overclocking: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 9700X

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus ships with a 900 MHz bump in die-to-die clock speed compared to the Core Ultra 7 265K. This suggests that Intel has pretty much cranked all the knobs to the maximum straight from the factory. However, a unique new feature is that the bump in die-to-die frequency is now standard, and you don’t need a Z-series board to unlock it.

With a Z-series motherboard, you can get more granular in your overclocking. Intel has controls for core overclocking, of course, but also levers for uncore frequencies and official support for far higher memory speeds. Although the disappointment of Arrow Lake has stained its reputation, this generation introduced some of the deepest overclocking features we’ve ever seen, and they shine on the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus.

AMD’s Zen 5 chips still feature the same tried-and-tested overclocking suite, with the main focus on Precision Boost Overdrive 2 (PBO2) and Curve Optimizer. PBO2 allows users to let the CPU govern itself and adjust its frequencies based on available power and thermal headroom.

Curve Optimizer is another key feature that enables finer control. You can achieve even greater gains by fine-tuning the voltage offsets per core. This can often lead to sustained higher boost clocks without manually setting fixed high voltages or frequencies. While manual overclocking is still possible on Zen 5 CPUs, the best and most consistent results often come from Curve Optimizer and Precision Boost Overdrive 2.

While both CPUs offer unlocked multipliers, they take different approaches to overclocking. Intel’s approach offers slightly greater flexibility, and its CPUs traditionally have more overclocking headroom, though this is subject to the silicon lottery. AMD has better automated features, such as PBO, but overclocking gains are often minimal.

⭐ Winner: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

Both CPUs have compelling overclocking features, but Intel just edges it out in this round thanks to greater flexibility with its overclocking tools.

Power Consumption, Efficiency, and Cooling: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 9700X

With the launch of Arrow Lake, Intel shifted its focus to efficiency, sacrificing some performance in the process. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus takes things back slightly in the power consumption department, pushing the power limits for more performance. We’re using the default 65W TDP for the Ryzen 7 9700X here, though note its power consumption will increase significantly with its optional 105W TDP mode.

Starting with idle power consumption, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus consumes an average of 29 watts in this test, while the Ryzen 7 9700X is around 31% lower at 22 watts. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus also consumes 4 more watts at idle than the Ultra 7 265K. When in an active idle state, such as YouTube playback, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus spikes to 38 watts, a clear and noticeable 52% increase over the Ryzen 7 9700X.

Moving on to all-core workloads to gauge peak power consumption, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus consumes a whopping 198% more power than the Ryzen 7 9700X in the y-cruncher multi-threaded AVX test. That largely comes down to Zen 5’s implementation of AVX-512, which allows the Ryzen 7 9700X to run these SMID-style instructions far more efficiently.

In Cinebench 2024’s multi-core render, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus consumes around 160% more power than the Ryzen 7 9700X. Of course, as we saw earlier, the 270K Plus also delivers around 90% better performance than the Ryzen 7 9700X in this test, but the raw efficiency numbers still favor AMD.

Looking at a few more benchmarks, the same trend can be seen in Blender - Monster, where the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus consumes 151% more power than the 9700X. Interestingly, the new Arrow Lake Refresh CPU also demands 45% more power on average than the Core Ultra 7 265K, a significant difference. Between the 270K Plus and the Ryzen 7 9700X, the power demand gap is around 145% in HandBrake x265 encoding, 161% in HandBrake SVT_AV1, and 179% in Blender Classroom.

We can also look at the performance-per-watt numbers from various benchmarks to gauge the efficiency of the two CPUs. First, in HandBrake x265 encoding, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is around 29% worse in watts-per-fps than the Ryzen 7 9700X. In Linpack, the efficiency gap narrows to around 10%, still in favor of the Ryzen 7 9700X. Cinebench 2024 also shows the points-per-watt calculation favoring the AMD chip by about 20%.

Another neat way to visualize the power consumption difference is by a scatter plot, which shows the relationship between power and performance a bit more clearly. In the Linpack efficiency graph, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is plotted to the far bottom right, while the 9700X is a bit to the middle. This means that the 270K Plus delivers much better performance with only a slight increase in power draw.

The Blender Classroom scatter plot is much more interesting. While the 270K Plus is still plotted to the far right, it is much higher on the task energy axis this time around. The 9700X is almost at the bottom-left of the graph, making it much more efficient than the 270K Plus at this task, even though its performance is quite a bit lower.

The entire conversation about power consumption is quite interesting. On the one hand, the Ryzen 7 9700X is much more efficient and consumes much, much less power than the 270K Plus, but its overall performance level is also quite a bit lower. It almost seems like the two CPUs are not in the same class, but their price tags suggest otherwise.

⭐ Winner: AMD Ryzen 7 9700X

The AMD Ryzen 7 9700X consumes less than half the power on average than the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, and is also more efficient in several tests, making it the clear winner in this round.

Pricing: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 9700X

Intel has launched the Arrow Lake refresh CPUs at a very competitive price point. The $300 Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is almost $100 cheaper than the Core Ultra 7 265K when it launched. This puts it in the same ballpark as the Ryzen 7 9700X, which can be found at around $310 at the time of writing. However, comparing the prices of the two CPUs is not as straightforward as just comparing the numbers on the box.

To get a clearer idea of how much each CPU costs, we need to evaluate the total cost of the platform. While the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is slightly cheaper up front, it may not be more affordable once we factor in the cost of other components such as RAM, a compatible motherboard, and a CPU cooler. Due to how recent the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is, prices have shifted up toward $350, as well.

DRAM prices are absolutely ridiculous at the time of writing due to the global memory shortage, so the numbers here may change. Both CPUs are compatible with DDR5 memory, which is why this particular cost is shared. A decent 32GB (16x2) DDR5 memory kit running at 6000 MT/s at CL36 can run you about $350-$400 at current rates.

The pricing conversation becomes more interesting once we get to the motherboards. Intel’s LGA1851 platform offers multiple chipsets at different price points, but we would go with Z890 motherboards to take advantage of the unlocked multiplier. A basic Z890 motherboard is currently in the $200-300 range, but you can go with more feature-rich variants that can cost as much as $600 for the really fancy ones.

On the AMD side, the AM5 platform has matured a bit and is not quite as expensive as Intel. Our chipset of choice for the 9700X is the X670E, the top-of-the-line AM5 chipset for this generation. A basic X670E motherboard can be found in the $150-200 range, while a more competent offering can be in the $300-400 range, slightly less than Intel’s offerings. You can even go with a more affordable B-series motherboard and still take advantage of the 9700X’s overclocking capabilities.

For cooling, both CPUs need competent aftermarket solutions. For the 270K Plus, a high-end dual-tower air cooler ($100-120) or a 360mm AiO liquid cooler ($150-250) is recommended, given its higher power draw. You can get away with a 240mm AiO liquid cooler on the Ryzen 7 9700X ($80-150), but just to be on the safe side, investing in a 360mm AiO is not a bad idea.

Currently, AMD makes a much stronger case for total platform cost. It can be paired with more affordable motherboards without losing functionality, and it is also easier and cheaper to cool. Plus, it draws much less power, which can affect other purchasing decisions, such as the power supply.

Moreover, Intel’s LGA1851 is basically a dead-end platform. We do not expect another CPU release on this platform, which is a big factor in determining the overall value of this investment. On the flip side, AMD has committed to supporting the AM5 socket until at least 2027, which makes it much better from a longevity standpoint.

⭐ Winner: AMD Ryzen 7 9700X

While the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is slightly cheaper up front, its total platform cost is higher, which makes it a difficult bargain. Socket LGA1851 is also on its last legs, which does not do the value proposition any favors.

Bottom Line: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 9700X

With a dominant 4-2 lead in our six-round gauntlet, the new Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus decimates the Ryzen 7 9700X. Intel is seeking redemption with Arrow Lake Refresh, and they seem to have taken a step in the right direction with the 270K Plus.

The Ryzen 7 9700X put up a respectable showing in our gaming and productivity tests, but it was beaten in both rounds by the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus. The productivity numbers are particularly astonishing, as the gap is so big that you are almost forced to double-check the numbers.

The obvious caveat is power draw. Intel has increased the power draw of the 270K Plus quite significantly over the 265K. This also means that it consumes around 150-200% more power than the Ryzen 7 9700X in certain all-core workloads, though that gap shrinks if you plan on running the 9700X in its 105W mode. It is also a bit more costly once you factor in the price of the entire platform. Not to mention, the LGA1851 platform is on its way out with Nova Lake, which Intel says is on-track to launch this year.

Nevertheless, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus has its place. It is a very competent $300 CPU that decimates most of our lineup in productivity, though it is still a bit behind the Ryzen X3D CPUs in gaming. As for the Ryzen 7 9700X, it seems overdue for a price cut, as it doesn't justify its $310 price tag when more compelling options are available at a similar price.

⭐ Winner: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

More CPU Faceoffs

• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X vs Intel Core i9-14900K
• Intel Core i5-14400 vs AMD Ryzen 5 7600X
• AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D vs Intel Core i9-14900K
• AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D vs Ryzen 7 9800X3D

Intel's 2026 roadmap is unlike any the company has published in recent years, because its manufacturing ambitions and its product launches have to succeed simultaneously.

Panther Lake, the Core Ultra Series 3 laptop processor unveiled at CES in January, is the first consumer chip built on Intel 18A — the company's new process node combining RibbonFET GAA transistors with PowerVia backside power delivery. Clearwater Forest, the next-generation Xeon E-core server CPU formally introduced March 3 at MWC 2026, is the server counterpart to it, and both are proof points for a foundry business that Intel has publicly stated could not justify proceeding to its next node, 14A, without first securing a major external customer.

Meanwhile, Intel is currently shipping the AI data center chip Gaudi 3, which has been available through cloud partners since late 2024. The chip was supposed to be followed by Falcon Shores, but Intel cancelled it for commercial release and confirmed it would deploy the chip internally instead, redirecting its GPU roadmap toward inference workloads. That produced Crescent Island, an inference-focused data center GPU which is expected to enter customer testing in the second half of 2026, with a potential successor in ‘Jaguar Shores’, due 2027.

Meteor Lake to Nova Lake

Since 2023, Intel's consumer CPU roadmap has focused on architectural consolidation, including the abandonment of the monolithic die. Meteor Lake, which launched in December 2023 as the first Core Ultra series processor, moved Intel's consumer laptop chips onto Intel 4 with Foveros 3D packaging, splitting compute, graphics, SoC, and I/O functions across separate tiles connected via hybrid bonding. That was an inflection point, with every subsequent generation iterating on that foundation rather than departing from it.

Then came Lunar Lake, the Core Ultra 200V series that launched in September 2024, which Intel hailed as its most power-efficient x86 platform, targeting the Copilot+ PC category with a fourth-generation NPU and the debut of the Xe2 graphics architecture. Arrow Lake followed in October 2024 as the desktop counterpart under the Core Ultra 200S branding.

While both share the multi-tile approach, they diverge at the process level. Arrow Lake consumer parts don’t use Intel 20A; Intel publicly confirmed the decision to use external nodes instead — almost certainly from TSMC — for the consumer desktop line. Intel originally said that 20A would be the node that would introduce RibbonFET and PowerVia, but the company moved those technologies to 18A instead and treated 20A as a stepping stone it bypassed for production.

Panther Lake, announced at CES in January 2026 as Core Ultra Series 3, is the first client platform built on Intel 18A. Intel cited over 200 system designs in development across laptop partners, alongside a claimed 60% better multi-threaded performance versus Lunar Lake at similar power, and up to 180 total platform TOPS — 120 of which come from the Xe3 integrated GPU and 50 from the NPU 5 architecture. Those figures are Intel estimates tied to specific workloads and comparison generations; the NPU alone meets Microsoft's 40 TOPS threshold for Copilot+ PC certification, but the 180 TOPS figure reflects all three compute engines combined.

Nova Lake is next, with Intel's Q4 2025 earnings guidance initially targeting an end-of-2026 launch. This, as we understand, is likely to be delayed to 2027; process node and die configuration details remain unconfirmed, and it’s far too early to speculate given that the upcoming Arrow Lake refresh (Core Ultra 200K Plus) is still to come.

Xeon and data center CPUs

Xeon 6 formalized a split Intel had been building toward for several years: P-core variants targeted at compute-intensive and AI inference workloads, and E-core variants aimed at density, throughput-per-watt, and scale-out workloads like containerized cloud infrastructure.

Sierra Forest launched in June 2024 as the first Intel 3 server product. Its E-core design packs a high thread count into a constrained thermal envelope, making it well-suited for high-density rack deployments. Granite Rapids, the P-core counterpart, followed in September 2024, targeting scientific computing, high-performance databases, and AI inference on large models. Both families share a common platform foundation — a unified I/O die connected via EMIB packaging — which reduces platform churn for OEMs and provides a validation reuse advantage across derivative SKUs.

Meanwhile, Clearwater Forest, introduced March 3 at MWC 2026, is Intel's first 18A server CPU. Expected to be released later this year, the chip packs 288 Darkmont E-cores across 12 compute chiplets in its maximum configuration, each with 24 cores all built on 18A. Those compute tiles are stacked on three active base dies fabricated on Intel 3 using Foveros Direct 3D, while two I/O tiles on Intel 7 handle connectivity, and lateral integration across the package is handled by EMIB.

EMIB 3.5D then extends this further by combining those Foveros-stacked modules with Intel's second-generation EMIB bridges — scaled from 55-micron to 45-micron bump pitch — to link heterogeneous tiles laterally across the package, whether those are identical compute modules or disparate I/O and memory dies. The result is a package whose total silicon area far exceeds what a conventional silicon interposer could accommodate. A clean Clearwater Forest launch would therefore validate both Intel 18A and its advanced packaging simultaneously.

Finally, Diamond Rapids will arrive as an exclusively 16-channel platform after Intel cancelled the 8-channel SKUs that were originally planned for the Xeon 7 lineup. The remaining parts are expected to pack up to 192 P-cores across four compute tiles in an LGA9324 package, with 2nd-generation MRDIMM support pushing memory bandwidth to roughly 1.6 TB/s — nearly double Granite Rapids' ~844 GB/s. Intel has indicated a 2H 2026 launch window, but has said nothing more solid at this stage.

AI accelerators

Intel’s AI accelerator portfolio hasn’t followed as clean a generational progression as its CPUs have. Gaudi 3, as previously mentioned, is the current shipping product and has been available through cloud partners and direct customers since late 2024, with Intel expanding availability throughout 2025.

Intel has marketed Gaudi 3 around openness and software portability, with the argument being that customers locked into Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem face procurement and pricing constraints that a chip running on open frameworks like PyTorch and oneAPI can avoid. While this has let the chip find some traction, Gaudi 3 hasn’t achieved a meaningful share in large-scale training clusters where Nvidia’s accelerators still dominate by a huge margin.

The most concrete successor to Gaudi 3 in the near-term is Crescent Island, which Intel announced as an inference-focused data center GPU in October 2025 at the OCP Global Summit, with customer sampling due to begin in the second half of 2026. The card is built on the Xe3P architecture, a performance-enhanced version of the Xe3 GPU used in Panther Lake, and carries 160 GB of LPDDR5X memory.

That memory choice is a deliberate departure from the HBM stacks used by Nvidia and AMD in their high-end accelerators: Intel is positioning Crescent Island as a power- and cost-optimized part for air-cooled enterprise servers, with Intel CTO Sachin Katti citing "tokens-as-a-service" providers as the primary target. No performance figures have been disclosed.

When and if it does sample later this year, it will be going up against AMD's Instinct MI450 and Nvidia's Vera Rubin architecture, both of which use HBM4 and target a broader range of workloads. Crescent Island's narrower inference focus could make it competitive on cost-per-token, but the 160GB LPDDR5X configuration offers substantially less memory bandwidth than HBM-based competitors, which remains the main bottleneck for large model inference.

Jaguar Shores, meanwhile, has been confirmed by Intel as a product, though technical details about it remain sparse. Intel products chief Michelle Johnston Holthaus stated during the company's Q1 2025 earnings call that Jaguar Shores remains on the AI roadmap despite the cancellation of its predecessor, Falcon Shores, and described it as a rack-scale design incorporating silicon photonics interconnects. Intel has also confirmed, via a slide shown at its AI Summit, that Jaguar Shores will carry the Gaudi brand and use HBM4 memory from SK hynix.

Should it launch, Jaguar Shores would be Intel’s first return to HBM-based AI acceleration since Ponte Vecchio, but specifications remain unconfirmed, and we’re very unlikely to see a release until 2027 at the earliest. That would put it up against Nvidia’s Vera Rubin successors and AMD’s Instinct MI500 series — and whether it can be competitive by then depends heavily on software maturity, an area where Intel’s track record in AI acceleration has been consistently weak.

Process nodes and packaging

Intel 4, which debuted with Meteor Lake, was Intel's first EUV-enabled manufacturing node, claiming 21.5% higher frequencies at the same power as Intel 7, or 40% lower power consumption at the same frequency, alongside a 2x transistor density improvement for high-performance libraries. Intel 4 also introduced second-generation Contact-over-Active-Gate, enhanced copper interconnects with cobalt cladding for better performance and electromigration resistance, and doubled MIM capacitance density to reduce voltage droop.

Production ran at Intel's D1 facility in Hillsboro, Oregon, with Fab 34 in Ireland coming online for Intel 4 volume production in late 2023. Notably, only Meteor Lake's compute tile used Intel 4; the graphics, SoC, and I/O tiles were sourced from TSMC and older Intel nodes, reflecting the limited scope of Intel 4 as a chiplet-specific node.

Intel 3 followed as an 18% performance-per-watt improvement over Intel 4, with broader EUV usage, improved transistor cells, and both I/O and high-density cell libraries suited for server workloads. Sierra Forest, which launched in June 2024 as the first E-core Xeon 6, was its first flagship product, followed by Granite Rapids with P-cores in September 2024. Unlike Intel 4, Intel 3 was designed as a more general-purpose node from the start, underpinning Intel's server ramp and serving as the base die for Clearwater Forest's heterogeneous packaging.

Intel 20A, meanwhile, was the planned introduction point for RibbonFET and PowerVia in production, and Intel confirmed it entered production readiness in 2024. But Intel also confirmed the decision to shift Arrow Lake consumer parts away from Intel 20A to external nodes. The only logical explanation for this is that Intel concentrated its 20A engineering on proving the key technologies it needed for 18A rather than committing a high-volume product line to an intermediate node.

Every product on Intel's 2026-2028 roadmap runs on Intel 18A, the company's first node to combine RibbonFET gate-all-around transistors with PowerVia backside power delivery. RibbonFET wraps the gate entirely around the channel on all four sides, improving electrostatic control and reducing leakage compared to the FinFET structures Intel used through its 10th Gen era. PowerVia routes power through the back of the silicon wafer, freeing front-side routing resources for signal interconnects. 18A entered high-volume manufacturing in October, but yields remain below profitable levels and, per CFO David Zinsner, will not reach desired cost thresholds until the end of 2026 at the earliest.

Intel 14A, which uses High-NA EUV — which Intel is the first to deploy — remains contingent on securing a major external foundry customer. The good news is that Intel has said it has two prospective customers in the works following early PDK access, and CEO Lip-Bu Tan reckons that firm supplier decisions will be made in the “second half of this year… extending into the first half of 2027.” A lot is riding on these prospective customers, with Intel having publicly discussed the possibility of slowing or cancelling 14A and subsequent nodes if external foundry revenue does not materialize at scale. Without it, the capital expenditure required to develop and ramp leading-edge nodes past 18A will become extremely difficult to justify.

The future of Intel

Whether Clearwater Forest's 2026 launch materializes will be a solid indication of whether 18A performs at the scale Intel has projected, while Panther Lake's rollout through laptop OEMs will test whether 18A volume manufacturing is genuinely ramping up or still constrained to early production quantities.

Meanwhile, any announcement from Intel Foundry on an external customer committing to 18A or beginning 14A engagement could substantially change the economics of Intel’s roadmap.

During the 10nm era, Intel's manufacturing problems were visible and protracted over several years. Today's timeline is more compressed, and Intel’s public milestones — Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest shipping on 18A in close succession — are specific enough to hold the company to account.

Intel has finally revealed its long-awaited Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs. Dubbed Core Ultra 200S Plus, Intel is introducing two new chips in its lineup, both of which come with a price cut compared to their non-Plus predecessors. The headline claim is 15% higher gaming performance at 1080p compared to stock Arrow Lake chips — a number that Intel says it gathered from a geomean of 38 games tested at 1080p with High settings, in a bid to earn a spot among the best CPUs for gaming.

Arrow Lake Refresh brings three new SKUs total: two CPUs and one variant. Both come with an extra 4 E-cores compared to their stock designs, along with up to a 900MHz boost in die-to-die frequency, and they’ll be available in both K (unlocked) versions. The Core Ultra 5 250K is also available in a KF (unlocked without integrated graphics) version. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus comes with 24 cores, split across eight P-cores and 16 E-cores, matching the Core Ultra 9 285K. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus comes with 18 cores across six P-cores and 12 E-cores, falling slightly below the 20 cores available on the Core Ultra 7 265K.

~ = Unknown

In addition to higher core counts, Intel boosted the speed of the memory controller by up to 900MHz. Memory (and core-to-core) latency was one of the weaker aspects of the Arrow Lake architecture initially, and Intel claims this boost will help drive “system latency down and gaming performance up.”

Arrow Lake is one of Intel’s most complex architectures to date, and the first to use a chiplet design (or tile-based design, as Intel calls it), brought together with Foveros packaging. The Compute Tile, built on TSMC N3B, lives apart from the SoC tile, built on N6, which houses the display and media engines, PCIe PHYs, memory PHYs, and the memory controllers. Previous Intel architectures have used a monolithic design where the memory controllers are very close to the cores. By boosting the clock of the memory controller, Intel hopes to drive down one of the weaker aspects of Arrow Lake from an architectural standpoint.

But that’s only one part of the gaming boost, according to Intel. The other side of it is the Intel Binary Optimization Tool, or iBOT, which Intel says is “a first-of-its-kind binary translation layer optimization capability that can improve native performance in select games.” This feature, according to Intel, can increase instruction per clock (IPC) in certain games, even if that game has been optimized for a different architecture or game console. Notably, Intel says it improves performance even for workloads optimized for other x86 architectures; this isn’t an ARM translation layer along the lines of Microsoft Prism or Apple Rosetta.

iBOT is one of the most interesting features of Arrow Lake Refresh, but we still don’t know much about it. Intel has kept its technical capabilities vague, so it’s something we’ll need to look into once we get our hands on the Core Ultra 7 270K and Core Ultra 5 250K. For now, Intel says iBOT is “a key aspect of Intel’s long-term performance roadmap for enthusiasts.” What we do know is that iBOT is an optional feature within Intel Application Optimization (APO) when you switch to advanced mode.

Outside of the chips themselves, Intel is bringing faster memory speeds and early support for 4R CUDIMMs on select 800-series motherboards. For standard DDR5 DIMMs, Intel is upping the officially supported speeds to 7,200MT/s, which is a speed that even standard Arrow Lake chips can maintain, though it isn’t officially supported. With the Boost BIOS profile, warrantied speeds go up to 8,000MT/s.

4R CUDIMM support (four-rank) allows much higher memory capacities on consumer-grade motherboards, offering up to 128GB of capacity per DIMM. MSI and ADATA were the first to demonstrate stability of 4R CUDIMMs in November of last year, and Intel says it’s opening up support for them on new 800-series motherboards launching throughout 2026.

On average, Intel claims the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is 15% faster than the Core Ultra 7 265K, with a peak as high as up to 39% in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, according to Intel’s testing. This title, along with Hitman 3, where the 270K showed a 22% uplift, use iBOT. Elsewhere, the gains are less pronounced but still present. The 270K posted up to a 12% boost in F1 25 and up to 9% in Star Wars Outlaws, neither of which use iBOT.

The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is 13% faster than the Core Ultra 5 245K on average, according to Intel. Once again, the largest gains come from games with iBOT; Borderlands 3 at 20% and Far Cry 6 at 24%. Outside of iBOT, the gains are still solid, with Battlefield 6 showing a 10% uplift and Star Wars Outlaws climbing by 8%. For all game testing, Intel used a 1080p resolution at High settings and took the median result of three runs. You can see the system configurations in the slides above.

In applications, Intel claims up to a 2x performance improvement compared to AMD’s Zen 5 competition, but it’s not exactly a fair battle. Intel’s newest CPUs come with massive core arrays compared to the homogenous architecture of Zen 5. It’s a battle that Intel is always going to win. However, there is something to be said about getting a CPU with 24 cores for $300, especially if you plan on running heavily-threaded workloads like Blender or Handbrake.

That might be the most important takeaway about Arrow Lake Refresh: the price. Intel has drastically cut the list price of these chips compared to their Arrow Lake counterparts. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus starts at $199, while the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus starts at $299, putting the CPUs in direct competition with AMD’s Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X, respectively. The Core Ultra 5 245K originally launched for over $300, while the Core Ultra 7 265K launched at $400.

The price cuts are a reflection of what we can see in the market right now — the Core Ultra 5 245K sells for about $200, while the 265K is available for anywhere from $280 to $310. These prices make Arrow Lake Refresh significantly more competitive for gamers at budget price points. Although AMD holds a clear lead in gaming performance with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, Arrow Lake Refresh comes in at a much lower price.

Extrapolating out the performance claims, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus bodes particularly well. Based on our own testing, the Ryzen 7 9700X is about 4% faster than the Core Ultra 7 265K at 1080p in games. If Intel’s 15% claim holds up, Arrow Lake Refresh takes the lead in this price bracket. More importantly, Intel’s Core i7-14700K is around 11% faster than the Core Ultra 7 265K. Once again, that 15% jump would put Intel on top in this price bracket, and finally give Intel a faster gaming CPU than its 14th-Gen offerings.

For now, that’s just speculation. Thankfully, we won’t have to wait long to see Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs in action. Intel says you’ll be able to find Core Ultra 200S Plus CPUs at retailers starting on March 26. Our test benches are already running at full tilt with Intel’s latest, so we’ll have more to share on performance in full reviews shortly.

Intel is reportedly preparing to launch its Arrow Lake refresh, aka 16th Gen, next month with at least three SKUs present at launch. One of those is the Core Ultra 250K Plus, the successor to the existing Core Ultra 245K, with a bumped-up core config and tuned clock speeds. While we've seen benchmarks leaks for other ARL-R chips before, the 250K Plus has just appeared for the first time on Geekbench.

This processor ended up scoring 3,113 points in the single-core test and walked away with 15,251 points in the multi-core test. Those are some pretty solid numbers and in line with what we expect from a new Core Ultra 5 desktop processor. For some reason, Geekbench's CPU database doesn't include the 245K so we don't have a direct point of comparison, but we can still search for individual runs on the platform.

Most of the 245K results listings show a single-core score under 3,000, but multi-core is almost always between 17,000-18,000, which means the Core Ultra 250K Plus tested here was ahead in one place but trailing in the other. This leaked run was conducted on an Asus Prime Z890-P WIFI motherboard with 32GB of RAM, and the processor boosted up to 5.3 GHz during testing. That lines up with the previous leak from last year.

The Core Ultra 250K Plus is supposed to be an 18-core processor with 6 P-cores and 12 E-cores (up from 6P+8E on 245K). It features a 100 MHz increase in both of those core boost clocks, along with 100 MHz decrease in the E-core base clock speeds. Like other Arrow Lake refresh chips, it has support for native DDR5-7200 and will use the existing LGA 1851 socket, yet there are new motherboards planned.

This will be Intel's last hurrah in the desktop segment until Nova Lake is expected to debut at the end of this year, marking a true next-gen leap similar to what Panther Lake has done on mobile. Recently, prices and embargo dates for these ARL-R chips leaked out and showed a very enticing picture, while confirming that the Core Ultra 9 SKU is dead for this generation.

Intel has updated its mobile lineup with Panther Lake, which feels like a true next-gen leap in every way, but its upcoming desktop series is a by-the-books iterative upgrade. Arrow Lake Refresh is confirmed to launch this year, and the latest rumor from @momomo_us says that date is March 2026. The review embargo for the initial batch of ARL-R chips is reportedly lifting on March 23.

The Arrow Lake refresh lineup is expected to serve as a stopgap before the next-gen desktop product, Nova Lake, debuts at the end of this year. Each SKU in this release is a more advanced version of the existing Arrow Lake silicon. For instance, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus has a 24-core configuration—up from 8 P-cores and 12 E-cores on the Core Ultra 7 265K to 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores.

Similarly, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is an upgrade to the existing Core Ultra 5 245K, featuring a 6P+12E core configuration that improves on the 6P+8E core layout of the latter. There are minor clock-speed bumps throughout, such as the P-core turbo increasing from 5.2 GHz to 5.3 GHz. Across the Arrow Lake refresh lineup, native CUDIMM RAM support has been upgraded to DDR5-7200.

Both the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus also had their prices leaked today, but take these with a grain of salt, as we still have a long way to go before launch, if the rumors are to be believed. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus was priced at $245.92, while the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus was listed at $357.12 on an undisclosed retailer, shared by @momomo_us. There's also a non-Plus Core Ultra 5 250KF (no iGPU) priced at $227.38.

Compared with the MSRP of the current-gen Arrow Lake chips they'll replace, we see a reduction across the board. The Core Ultra 7 265K, for example, launched at $394, but its successor is listed for just $357. The Core Ultra 5 245K cost $319 when it first came out, while only a $245 ask is mentioned for the 250K Plus. Lastly, the 245KF debuted at $29,4, yet the 250KF is supposedly only $227.

Street pricing for these CPUs is very different: we've seen the Core Ultra 5 245KF on sale for $199 on Newegg (with a free 240mm AIO), while the 265K is discounted to $275 on the same retailer's website. Taking all that into consideration, it's a fool's errand to speculate on pricing, especially given the industry's current volatility — not to mention that these were just one vendor's listings.

The most important takeaway from these two news items is the absence of a Core Ultra 9 SKU, specifically the 290K Plus, which may indicate a staggered launch. The reality is much grimmer, though: Videocardz reports that the chip has been cancelled because the 285K already is a 24-core SKU, so there won't be any real added value.

Unlike AMD, which offers a simple clock-speed bump with its recent Ryzen 7 9850X3D, Intel doesn't consider a simple clock-speed bump a meaningful enough upgrade to justify a refresh of an existing chip. According to sources close to the matter, the Blue Team doesn't want a "product overlap" with two 24-core chips, so it's been cancelled outright in favor of upgraded Core Ultra 7 and Core Ultra 5 SKUs.

Minisforum let me go hands-on with its CES 2026 Innovation Award-winning Mini Workstation, so to get a grasp of what the diminutive new Minisforum MS-02 Ultra could offer, I decided to see if it could replace my aging but capable desktop PC.

This is a true David vs Goliath battle, at least in terms of physical presence. The sub-5-liter MS-02 Ultra battles with my much larger desktop system packed into a 55-liter Fractal Define S PC case. However, the result of the clash wasn’t as clear-cut as I expected, making me wonder what kind of PC I should be using daily in 2026.

Before we get into a specifications table, where you can see exactly how these two systems compare feature-by-feature, it is important to highlight the physical differences. The MS-02 Ultra is an incredible 11 times smaller than my Define S-desktop system. Obviously, such a small size means there are sacrifices to be made in terms of expandability, configurability, thermals, and noise. But those limitations are counterweighted by the benefits of the device being much physically smaller. Dare I say, the Minisforum is kind of portable, and even cute, which is not something I could say about the Define S PC.

The table below makes clear the specs of the Minisforum MS-02 Ultra workstation against those of the system it will have to battle on my desk.

CPU and GPU showdown

The Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX should be much more capable than the i5-14400F that I bought at Amazon for $115 last year. It tempts with the advantages of its modern Intel architecture, higher clock boost, and easily outguns my Raptor Lake Refresh chip on core count. Moreover, the new platform brings quite a lot of modern niceties. Particularly welcome, from my perspective, are the trio of really fast USB4 (including 2x USB4 v2) ports, all with DisplayPort capabilities.

A distinct advantage I expected in moving to the MS-02 Ultra was from the increased core count using Intel’s more modern architecture. Indeed, CPU-heavy benchmarks would show the new chip could convincingly eclipse the old mid-range Core i5-14400F in both single- and multicore workloads, given sufficient power supply and cooling capacity. But, we'll see how that translates to ‘Mark’s world’ of computing in the benchmarks section, below.

I’ll stress again that a brief check of the specs, ahead of any actual comparison testing, may suggest the little Minisforum would win hands-down in CPU-focused processing tasks, but the best consumer-grade GPU I could get to fit inside its sub-5-liter chassis would be crushed by the triple-fan behemoth in my ATX desktop. Indeed, that is sort of what happened. There are nuances, though, especially as I don’t really play any AAA or eSports PC games that launched in the 2020s, or dabble in local AI.

The MS-02 Ultra runs using the integrated graphics on the Core Ultra 9 285HX by. default. However, there’s a PCIe5.0 x16 slot, and incredibly, there’s room to install a two-slot low profile (LP) graphics card. This, plus the spare 8-pin connector from the built-in 350W PSU, allowed me to install a Gigabyte RTX 5060 OC LP GPU.

Nvidia’s RTX 5060 seemed to be the best graphics card choice for me, as a generalist/hobbyist PC user, though I’ve seen other early adopters of the MS-02 Ultra install cards like the Intel Arc Pro B50 (16GB), Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 Blackwell SFF (24GB), and the RTX 4000 SFF Ada (20GB). These offer far more VRAM but can cost a lot more, too. But thanks to this mini workstation allowing for GPU upgrades, perhaps the RTX 6060 or RTX 7060 will arrive one day with more than 8GB of VRAM on board, and in a low-profile form factor. Or maybe AMD will make a performant LP form factor card in the meantime.

More on specs

I chose my Fractal Define S-housed desktop's motherboard as it was one of the few B760 chipset boards with a USB-C 20 Gbps port as standard at the price point. So, getting three times more USB-C ports, with two of them supporting up to 80 Gbps as standard, on the compact MS-02 Ultra was a welcome platform boost. I’m sure there is potential here for some very useful docking or even eGPU use-cases.

I have a pair of Crucial X10 Pro 4TB devices for keeping games, TV, and movie libraries portable. My testing confirmed the USB4 v2 ports on the front work at full USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 (20 Gbps) speeds with the X10 Pro. Some USB4 controllers surprisingly don’t support Gen 2x2 and would fall back to 10 Gbps mode. My X10 Pros run about a third of the speed of the built-in M.2 SSD provided by Minisforum, but I feel they are good for external, highly portable units.

An extra two 25 GbE network ports and two of the available M.2 SSD slots are provided by a pre-installed low-profile card in the MS-02 Ultra’s PCIe 4.0 x16 slot. However, I chose to replace that with a cheap USB Type-A 3.0 card with four ports, as I really like to have lots of USB ports. My old desktop used a USB adaptor for Wi-Fi 6 and didn’t have Bluetooth. The MS-02 has built-in Intel BE200 Wi-Fi 7 and BT 5.4 card.

There are three PCIe slots in the MS-02 Ultra, but adding the GPU takes up the room where two single-slot add-in-cards would otherwise fit. That compares poorly with my Define S desktop, which has five slots. With a bulky GPU fitted in that ATX system, it was still possible to add another three single-slot PCIe cards. Again, I have one installed in there, bristling with extra USB ports.

Preparing for my personal benchmark battle

The most demanding things thrown at my PC are video editing and games like The Division 2 and Far Cry 5. The Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark is just there for an added reference point, (I bought it, but I’ve not actually got around to playing it yet.) The same goes for Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I also like playing in Borderlands GOTY Enhanced Edition, Command & Conquer Generals, and Amiga Forever – but those are so old and lightweight they weren’t worth testing for this performance comparison.

Most of the time, my computer will be used for little more than multiscreen word processing and browsing, communicating with work colleagues, and a touch of ancient Photoshop and Illustrator dabbling. These help me prepare artwork for here on Tom’s Hardware, some YouTube stuff, as well as laser cutting and engraving. Also, Photoshop has recently been replaced by the Affinity suite.

So, without further ado, let’s get into those benchmarks, which unashamedly revolve around my personal general-purpose computer use, with a few gaming classics thrown in. I’ve also included a ‘tweener’ system, where my large desktop was fitted with the incongruously tiny RTX 5060 LP card.

Minisforum MS-02 Ultra productivity performance

The comparison table above doesn’t offer much in the way of surprises. The MS-02 Ultra with Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285HX does exceedingly well in CPU-intensive tests, particularly those that take advantage of the abundance of available threads. We see the 285HX is a star performer in Cinebench R23, with single-thread scores similar to desktop processors like the Core i9-14900K and Ryzen 9 9950X. For multicore, you are also good to compare with the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and i9‑14900F, but the unlocked i9‑14900K starts to pull ahead convincingly.

I also think the 7-Zip (de)compression benchmark shows the MS-02 mini workstation in a good light. Handbrake 4K transcoding wasn’t much better compared with my old 14400F, though. Meanwhile, PassMark Performance Test, a mix of CPU, graphics, memory, and disk tests, showed some worthwhile performance benefits from the Minisforum – when the RTX 5060 was installed.

Minisforum MS-02 Ultra gaming performance

It is almost moot to highlight that the Define S desktop with Radeon RX 9070 would dominate in 3D games and 3D benchmarks. Nevertheless, there were some interesting results showing that the Ultra 9 285HX / RTX 5060 didn’t always beat the i5-14400F / RTX 5060 due to titles simply being ‘GPU-limited.’ An interesting outlier was the crazy-town USA-set Far Cry 5, where Ubisoft’s Dunia Engine 2 (a modified CryEngine) seemed to prefer the desktop Raptor Lake Refresh under the hood. All the games were tested in 1440p, with no upscaling or frame-gen tech applied.

Minisforum MS-02 Ultra power consumption and noise

Now we move into an area of both strength and weakness for the Minisforum MS-02 Ultra. In my benchmarks table, above, I also included power and noise readings. Starting with the good news, the MS-02 requires less power while idling and doing light tasks – like writing this. It also uses about 120W less when gaming, and all the titles I enjoy play smoothly enough on the RTX 5060 system at high to ultra settings at 1440p without the use of any scaling or frame gen tech.

Some bad news for the mini workstation is that it is more audible when idling and under load, in my experience. Initially, I measured both systems from about arm’s length distance. My Define S desktop uses large Noctua fans and sits under the desk, and in the comparison results, you see that even using the tiny RTX 5060 didn’t increase the noticeable system noise – it is hard to be 100% confident about the 1dBA difference observed.

Having the MS-02 Ultra at arm's length from my seated position, but on the desk top, the noise level was quite high at 48 dBA under load, as per the above chart. However, sitting it under the desk, where the big DIY desktop PC was previously located, reduced the max noise level to 41 dBA. But it's a far smaller system, and when positioned in the space vacated by the Define S, the Minisforum front panel moves beyond arm's reach under the desk. It is necessary to bend quite low from the chair to reach the power button and front I/O, which isn't convenient. That's why I decided to keep it on the desk.

I also note that the Minisforum BIOS has various fan modes (quiet, balanced, and performance) and manual tweaking of the trio of system fans. I ran it at ‘Balanced,’ so there’s probably some tuning that could be done for better noise performance.

Bottom line

In some many ways, the Minisforum MS-02 Ultra held its own against my old home-built Goliath.. The pint-sized challenger does everything I need, and some more. There are clear advantages to be had in CPU-heavy workloads. In GPU-heavy tasks and gaming, there’s clearly enough juice for my particular needs today. If you think about the future, then unlike many other mini PCs, this one can get upgraded with a faster next-generation low-profile graphics card (and other compact PCIe cards) if and when they arrive at an affordable price.

I’ll continue to work on configuring the fans, with an eye on processor and memory temperatures, as the louder fans are the one aspect of the MS-02 Ultra that pokes me in the ribs. It may also be repositioned further back on the desk or under it to scale back its audible presence. The fan noise isn’t high-pitched, and I sometimes forget it, but less is more.

We must also talk about the price of the Minisforum MS-02 Ultra mini workstation. As of the this writing, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX model with 2x 25 GbE PCIe SFP+ NIC, 32GB DDR5, plus a 1TB M.2 PCIe4x4 SSD, and Windows 11 Pro is priced at $1,583.90 from Amazon.com. You can also go barebone (no RAM, SSD, or OS) for $1,229.90 using a $300 discount coupon on the page, which could be a great option if you have a spare DDR5 SO-DIMM, M.2 SSD, and can source your own OS. As with all PCs at this time, prices are very volatile.

The Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5060 OC LP 8G I bought to go in this system's PCIe ​5.0 x16 slot is currently $359 at Newegg. This was a necessary extra to indulge in the type and quality of gaming fun that I am used to.

Thus, for the Minisforum MS-02 Ultra 32GB/1TB with RTX 5060 LP graphics card installed, as tested, today's total price would be $1,942.90. Things have gotten a little pricier since I began my tests in early January, but that's the way the PC market is going.

We could talk about the comparison between the MS-02 Ultra build/cost and a desktop, with the latter offering much better value and expandability or upgradeability. However, getting something this performant yet compact, with this level of I/O spec and expandability, is going to be impossible with off-the-shelf parts. In this way, and especially for those with a use for the 2x 25 GbE PCIe SFP+ NIC, this mini workstation is a uniquely attractive package.

Panther Lake might've taken the spotlight at Intel's CES show floor last month, but the company has had another lineup in the oven for a while now: the now-confirmed Arrow Lake Refresh. Spanning across desktop and mobile, the upcoming 16th Gen CPUs from the Blue Team have already generously leaked, and today, we have yet another Geekbench listing to go over featuring the flagship Core Ultra 9 290K Plus.

The run was conducted on an Asus ROG Strix Z890-E Gaming Wi-Fi motherboard with 64 GB of DDR5-6800 memory. The chip netted 3,535 points in the single-core test, roughly 10.5% higher than its predecessor's 3,200 points. Comparing it to all the entries on Geekbench's processor benchmarks charts, that score actually puts the 290K Plus at the very top.

The multi-core score came out to 25,106 points, cementing an 11.29% lead over the 285K, and putting it past every other consumer Intel chip on Geekbench's database. But since these numbers only represent a single run instead of an average calculated from a large sample size, we can't take them at face value. Disclaimer aside, the results are still impressive.

The Core Ultra 290K Plus will likely serve as the successor to the outgoing Core Ultra 9 285K, mostly through minor clock speed enhancements. As such, rumors hint at the same 24-core (8P+16E) layout and 125W PL1 and 250W PL2 power limits. Leaks indicate E-Core boost has been upped by 200 MHz — from 4.6 GHz to 4.8 GHz — while the P-Core Turbo and Thermal Velocity Boost receive 100 MHz increases each.

We've previously covered the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus' Geekbench escapades as well; that SKU is expected to replace the existing 265K, and the preliminary numbers for it tell a similar story of ~10% better performance. There is no official release date for these chips yet, but Intel has confirmed they're coming with leaks pointing toward a March-April launch. Arrow Lake refresh can be a drop-in upgrade for many, as well, since it will be the company's final release on the current LGA 1851 socket.

Intel has confirmed Arrow Lake Refresh is coming, but it hasn't confirmed any SKUs or expected performance. As is always the case with pre-release benchmarks, we'll need to wait until the chips are available to truly evaluate performance.

While Panther Lake was the focus of Intel's CES 2026 presence, the company will also refresh its current-gen Arrow Lake lineup for both desktops and laptops soon. We've already seen these "Plus" processors in a few leaks, including a Geekbench listing, but a mobile SKU has been spotted in PassMark for the first time ever: the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus, succeeding the outgoing Core Ultra 9 285HX.

The Arrow Lake refresh scored 5,009 points in the single-core test, the highest for any x86 CPU on the site, and within the margin of error of the desktop Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus. It seems to be the first x86 mobile chip to break the 5,000 points barrier as well, since the next-in-line 285HX only managed 4,635 points, making the 290HX Plus 7.5% faster than its predecessor.

Moving on to the multi-core score, the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus netted 66,203 points, just a smidge below the full-fat Core Ultra 9 285K, along with AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D. That score already places it at number three in the desktop consumer x86 CPU hierarchy, but it's at the very top when it comes to mobile-only numbers. It beats even AMD's Ryzen 9 9955HX3D by 6.2% while Intel's own Core Ultra 9 285HX is 12.8% behind.

These results are from a single test, meaning the sample size is just one, so take all these performance estimates with a grain of salt. The PassMark listing also shows that the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus boosted to 5.45 GHz, and leaker x86deadandback speculated that the laptop used for testing was running DDR5-5600 SO-DIMM memory from Samsung.

As for the chip's specs, we know it's a routine refresh that maintains much of the same silicon. You're looking at a 24-core/24-thread config, with 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. The clock speeds are unknown, but it could be around 5.4-5.5 GHz for the 290HX Plus based on this PassMark run. Current rumors indicate that the Arrow Lake refresh will launch in March or April of this year.

Choosing the right CPU is critical when you’re building a new PC. If you’re wondering which CPU to buy, our CPU benchmark hierarchy goes in-depth on our latest benchmark results, and our roundup of the best CPUs for gaming offers our current recommendations, taking into account pricing, performance, and efficiency. Even with those resources, choosing the right CPU is a complex topic with a lot of moving parts.

AMD and Intel both make excellent processors, and there are reasons to pick up something as weak as the Core i3-14100F all the way up to the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, depending on your purpose. Here, we’ll walk you through how to make that decision, as well as give you some broad pointers on how to parse CPU naming conventions and specs.

AMD and Intel are currently winding down their respective generations. AMD has built out a broad lineup of Ryzen 9000 CPUs based on the Zen 5 architecture, and Intel has confirmed that it will reuse its current-gen Arrow Lake architecture with a refresh of CPUs dubbed Core Ultra 300-S. Intel has also confirmed it will move beyond Arrow Lake to the new Nova Lake architecture in late 2026, and AMD is working on its next-gen Zen 6 architecture, but without a firm timeline.

How to choose a CPU – the TL;DR

When you’re shopping or choosing between different CPUs, there are some broad ideas to keep in mind.

• Budget for your build and purpose – A CPU does nothing on its own, so define your budget in the context of a full system and what you intend to use that system for. That might mean settling on a slightly less powerful (but cheaper) CPU for a gaming system and reallocating that money toward a more powerful GPU, for example. If you’re on a tight budget, our ranking of the best budget CPUs can help.
• Performance only tells part of the story – Performance benchmarks are critical, but they need context. Efficiency, temperatures, overclocking headroom, and architectural features play a role in the CPU you should buy, which we dig into in our individual CPU reviews. Further, certain benchmarks aren’t relevant to every buyer. The Core i9-14900K may blow away the Ryzen 7 9800X3D in video transcoding, for example, but if you’re not transcoding any videos, that performance vector hardly matters.
• AMD and Intel are both good – Some enthusiasts prefer one brand over the other, but there are plenty of reasons to buy an Intel CPU over an AMD one or vice versa. Our Intel vs AMD faceoff will get you up to speed on where the brands currently stand, but there’s no reason to play favorites for the sake of doing so.
• Trust data, not lineups – AMD and Intel segment their CPU lineups so it’s easy to spot a more powerful CPU over a weaker one. These gaps aren’t made equally, however. For instance, the Core Ultra 7 265K offers 98% of the gaming performance of the Core Ultra 9 285K (functionally identical), despite the Core Ultra 9 costing around $200 more. Performance doesn’t scale linearly across a lineup.
• Architecture informs specs, not the other way around – Specs are important, but they start to fall apart when comparing CPUs from distant generations. The Ryzen 9 3950X and Ryzen 9 9950X both have 16 cores and 32 threads, and the Ryzen 9 9950X has a 21% faster clock speed. The Ryzen 9 9950X isn’t just 21% faster, though; it’s often twice as fast or even faster in productivity applications.

We’ll walk you through how to understand CPU names, specs, and prices, as well as how to put them all together to choose a CPU for your specific purpose. We’ll also take a look at the motherboard chipsets available this generation, as well as overclocking and how it plays into a buying decision.

How much you should spend on a CPU

Ignoring the secondhand market, you can spend anywhere from $50 to over $700 on a consumer CPU. You can spend even more with something like AMD’s Threadripper range, with a chip like the Threadripper 9980X selling for $5,000. It’s important to define the purpose of your CPU so you know how much you should spend.

There are exceptions to any rule, but CPU prices break down into a few broad categories.

• Basic use ($50 to $100) – For basic PC use, including browsing the internet and running lightweight office applications. CPUs in this bracket include the AMD Ryzen 5 5500 and Intel Core i3-14100F.
• Budget ($100 to $200) – More performance to power light gaming and slightly more intensive productivity apps. CPUs in this bracket include the Core i5-12400F and Ryzen 5 7600.
• Midrange ($200 to $350) – The sweet spot for gaming PCs, with enough power to run content creation apps. CPUs in this bracket include the Core Ultra 7 265K and Ryzen 7 9700X.
• High-end ($350 to $500) – Plenty of power for gaming, but a stronger emphasis on accelerating productivity and content creation apps with high core counts. You’ll find specialty chips like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D in this bracket, as well as previous-gen flagships like the Core i9-14900K.
• Flagship ($500+) – The fastest processors in a given generation. You won’t see much of a boost in gaming performance, with flagships focusing almost solely on accelerating productivity applications with the highest core counts, clock speeds, and power consumption. CPUs in this bracket include the Core Ultra 9 285K and Ryzen 9 9950X.

That should give you an idea of how much you should spend on a CPU. If you want to build a gaming PC, you’re probably focused in the midrange or high-end brackets. If you will regularly edit and transcode videos, however, you’re probably focused on the high-end to flagship range.

Understanding CPU names

AMD and Intel use slightly different naming conventions, but they follow the same template. Here’s how that broadly breaks down for desktop CPUs:

• Segment – Ryzen 5, Core Ultra 5
• Series – First number in model name, i.e. Core Ultra 5 245K, Ryzen 5 9600X
• Model – Numbers following the series number, i.e. Core Ultra 7 265K, Ryzen 7 9700X
• Modifier (Suffix) – Letter following model number, i.e. Core Ultra 5 245KF, Ryzen 7 9800X3D

that The segment and model numbers speak for themselves; a higher number is better. A Ryzen 9 sits above a Ryzen 5, and the Core Ultra 5 245K sits above the Core Ultra 5 225. The two tricky parts are the series and modifier, which is where a slight misunderstanding could lead to a vastly different CPU.

First, series: You may read that the first number in the model string refers to the architecture, but that isn’t the case. It’s just a series or generation. AMD and Intel reuse architectures. For instance, Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ and Ryzen 8000 ‘Phoenix’ chips both use the Zen 4 architecture. Similarly, the Core i5-13400F has two versions, one that uses 12th-gen Alder Lake and another that uses 13th-gen Raptor Lake, though thankfully without any notable performance differences.

On desktop, Intel and AMD mostly keep the lines straight. Ryzen 8000 wasn’t a proper generation, for instance; it’s a lineup of APUs that don’t mingle with the main Ryzen 7000 lineup. However, we’ve seen willingness, especially from AMD, to blur the lines between generation and architecture significantly on mobile. It’s good to get the naming convention straight in the event the same happens on desktop.

Suffixes give you a lot of information, but they vary between Intel and AMD. For AMD, here are suffixes you should know:

• X or XT – X-series processors are the main lineup of chips within a particular generation from AMD. The XT designation is used for rereleases of X-series chips with higher clock speeds. On the other end, chips without the X suffix are rereleases with lower power consumption and clock speeds.
• G – CPUs with a G suffix note integrated graphics, particularly for a lightweight gaming APU like the Ryzen 7 8700G. From Ryzen 7000 onward, AMD has included integrated graphics in its main lineup, though they’re significantly weaker than the iGPUs featured in G-series chips.
• F – AMD seldom uses the F suffix, but it notes processors that lack integrated graphics that they’d otherwise have. The Ryzen 5 8400F lacks the integrated graphics that are otherwise available this generation. The Ryzen 7 5800X, however, doesn’t have the F suffix but still lacks integrated graphics.
• X3D – X3D is used to note CPUs with AMD’s gaming-focused 3D V-Cache. Notably, it doesn’t say what generation of 3D V-Cache a chip uses. Ryzen 7000X3D and Ryzen 9000X3D chips, for example, use a different 3D V-Cache design.

Intel has a longer, more rigid lineup of suffixes that it has maintained for decades, making models much easier to parse compared to AMD:

• K – Unlocked for overclocking.
• F – Lacks integrated graphics.
• S – Special edition release.
• T – Low-power design, meant for compact systems.

Thankfully, Intel’s suffixes don’t require much explanation because of how rigid they are. If a processor lacks the K suffix, you can’t overclock it, pure and simple. Intel will combine suffixes when necessary, however. The Core Ultra 5 245KF is unlocked for overclocking but lacks integrated graphics, for example, while the Core i9-14900KS is a special edition of the unlocked Core i9-14900K.

Critical CPU specs to know, and what they mean

CPU specs are only useful if you understand what they mean – and, more importantly, what they don’t. Unlike generations past, where big clock speed boosts and core count jumps were common, AMD and Intel have much more conservative spec bumps each generation, if there's a spec bump at all.

Specs are still important for neighboring comparisons, but it's important to understand what they mean in the broader context of a CPU's architecture.

Cores/Threads

A CPU with more cores can execute more instructions in parallel, but how that manifests in real applications varies widely. Rendering applications like Blender and transcoding applications like Handbrake scale well with high core counts, for example. Games, on the other hand, don’t see large performance jumps past eight cores, and many games don’t even see a marked improvement beyond six cores.

AMD’s modern CPU cores are designed with simultaneous multi-threading, or SMT. This doubles the number of logical processes running on a physical CPU core. So, the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X has 32 threads. Intel originally introduced SMT – Intel calls it Hyper-Threading – but its current-gen Arrow Lake CPUs don’t use Hyper-Threading. Each physical CPU core only has a single thread.

Traditionally, CPUs use a homogeneous architecture; each core has the same design. Intel has pushed toward heterogeneous architectures in the past several generations, however, mixing together high-performance P-cores with high-efficiency E-cores within a single CPU. These designs can boost overall core count by leveraging weaker cores instead of high-performance cores across the entire die.

From a shopping perspective, it’s important to keep the heterogeneous architecture in mind for Intel chips. The Core i9-14900K has 24 cores compared to the Ryzen 9 9950X’s 16. However, both chips have 32 threads – the E-cores on the Core i9-14900K lack Hyper-Threading.

Clock Speed (Base/Boost)

Synchronizing the disparate components of a CPU architecture is a clock. Clock speed is a frequency – how many cycles are completed each second – and there are two numbers for a CPU. There’s a base and boost clock speed. In modern CPUs, the boost clock speed generally refers to the maximum clock speed on one or two cores, not the maximum clock speed for all cores operating at the same time. Often, one or two preferred cores will boost to higher speeds and handle heavy-duty calculations while the other cores operate at a lower frequency with less intensive work.

Clock speed is important, but it says less about how powerful a CPU is than it previously did. Critically, clock speed doesn’t say anything about how many instructions are executed per cycle. You can think about clock speed like the speed of a conveyor belt. You can increase the speed of the belt, but it might get too hot and break. Alternatively, you can keep the speed the same and widen the belt, or stack things on top of each other, to move more stuff at the same speed.

Rather than the belt speed, a better number to use would be how many items you're able to move. For CPUs, that number is instructions per clock, or IPC; you’ll also see it referred to as instructions per cycle. There are physical limitations of how high the clock speed can go, but if you're able to get more done with each clock cycle, the CPU runs faster.

IPC is a good indicator of architectural improvements from one generation to another, but you won’t find it listed on a spec sheet.

Cache and cache levels

CPUs execute a lot of instructions very quickly, so it’s important that the data needed for those instructions are close to the cores executing them. That’s your CPU’s cache. It’s a small amount of SRAM located on the package of the CPU. Without cache, your CPU would need to use your system’s DRAM for everything, which is considerably slower and would cause a significant bottleneck in your system. Decades ago, CPUs didn't need cache because the system memory could keep up with the pace of instruction execution. With a modern CPU, constantly going out to system memory would make your PC feel unusable.

Cache is organized into levels, with the lowest-number level being the fastest and smallest. L1 is the smallest and fastest, L2 cache is slightly larger, and L3 cache is larger still. CPU cores generally have dedicated L1 and L2 cache, while the L3 cache is much larger and shared across the cores. More cache is generally better, but there are limitations to how much cache can go on-package. Not only is SRAM expensive, it also takes up precious die space and contributes to heat. That’s why packaging technology like AMD’s 3D V-Cache have been such a breakthrough.

Although cache is important, more cache doesn’t lead to universally higher performance. It contributes to higher performance in applications where new data is flowing through memory frequently, such as in games.

Power and Operating Temperature

Power is a messy topic rife with misunderstandings in the world of CPUs. Generally, you’ll see power consumption shared as the Thermal Design Power, or TDP, of a CPU. However, TDP isn’t a power limit, and it doesn’t refer to power consumption. Rather, TDP refers to how much heat the CPU cooler needs to dissipate under maximum load. More power leads to more heat, so TDP is measured in power instead of temperature.

In use, your CPU will often consume less power than the TDP, and it can consume more power for brief periods of time as long as it stays within its thermal limit. To measure peak power consumption, AMD uses PPT, or Package Power Tracking, to note how much power the CPU socket can draw. Intel uses power levels, noted like PL1 and PL2. PL1 is synonymous with TDP, while higher level power limits show maximum power for transient spikes. For high-end, unlocked SKUs, Intel applies a power profile where PL1 = PL2. That means the CPU can sustain higher power consumption for longer than the specified window, assuming it has adequate access to cooling.

Finally, there’s a maximum safe operating temperature, often referred to as TJMax. Once your CPU hits its maximum operating temperature, it will reduce speeds in order to bring the temperature down. In the event the temperatures can’t drop, built-in safety mechanisms will shut down the PC.

Power is a complex topic, and specs don’t share the full picture of power consumption and operating temperatures. Here at Tom’s Hardware, we run a full suite of power and thermal tests for our CPU reviews, which provide a more accurate insight into what you can expect out of a chip. You should use power and temperature specifications to inform your cooler, case, and fan choices, not as hard and fast rules about power consumption.

Chipsets and sockets

Desktop CPUs are socketed, not soldered, so you’ll need to pick up a motherboard with the socket that matches your CPU. AMD is currently on Socket AM5 while Intel is on LGA 1851. Both are Land Grid Array (LGA) sockets, where the CPU features contact pads that press into spring-loaded pins in the motherboard socket. AMD previously used a PGA, or Pin Grid Array, socket where the pins were on the CPU itself. AMD abandoned this design with the release of Ryzen 7000 CPUs and sunsetting of Socket AM4.

The socket only defines physical compatibility between a CPU and motherboard; the chipset defines full compatibility. Here are the chipsets from AMD and Intel with the latest socket, and the CPUs they support:

AMD, especially, supports its sockets for several generations even with evolving chipsets. Pairing a newer CPU with an older chipset will generally require a BIOS update. Intel moves from socket to socket faster, but the same rule applies when the same socket is carried across multiple generations of chipsets.

There are a ton of differences between chipsets, but generally, you need a B-series chipset for AMD and a Z-series chipset for Intel. Those are the ranges that offer both memory and CPU overclocking – short of B840, which AMD oddly removed CPU overclocking capabilities from. A/H-series chipsets are for budget builds with limited capabilities, while higher-end chipsets pack features like additional PCIe lanes, and better USB and Wi-Fi capabilities.

The best course of action is to look at the individual motherboard you’re interested in once you’ve settled on a CPU. Chipset specifications aren’t rigid across the board, so you can only know the full capabilities of your motherboard once you have one in mind.

Overclocking and undervolting

Enthusiasts looking to squeeze the most performance out of their CPU need to keep overclocking (and undervolting) in mind. If you want to overclock your CPU, you’ll need to buy a specific type of CPU and motherboard.

AMD is more friendly to overclocking in that it’s available on nearly all desktop CPUs. There are rare exceptions like the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, but the vast majority of AMD CPUs have direct multiplier-based overclocking. In addition, AMD supports CPU and memory overclocking on both B- and X-series chipsets, short of the B840 chipset.

Intel charges a premium for overclocking capabilities. You need a K-series processor and a Z-series chipset for CPU overclocking.

Regardless of the brand, you can overclock the traditional way through your BIOS, or you can use one-click overclocking features. AMD offers Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO), which you can configure through the Ryzen Master software. Intel has its Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) that offers easy-to-use dials and a one-click overclocking feature.

Should you overclock your CPU?

When core counts were low and applications were designed for only a handful of threads, there were direct, immediate performance benefits from even a minor overclock. Today, things are different. You can still see a performance boost, but it depends on the application you're using and the CPU you’re overclocking.

A stable, day-to-day overclock is best to bridge small gaps in performance. For example, the Core i7-14700K and Core i9-14900K both come with eight P-cores, but the Core i9 has a higher boost clock speed and four additional E-cores. In applications that care mostly about those eight P-cores, you can get close to the stock performance of the Core i9-14900K with a moderate overclock on the Core i7-14700K on a couple of preferred P-cores.

The benefits of overclocking are dynamic, changing from generation to generation and across different applications, so there are no hard and fast rules on if you should overclock or not. Even if you plan to overclock, you shouldn’t expect lineup-breaking performance differences with modern CPU architectures.

Putting it all together

A CPU is one of the most important components of your PC, but it’s only one component. Once you’ve settled on a processor, make sure to check out our guides on the best SSDs, best RAM, best graphics cards, and best power supplies to pick your other components. Our roundup of the best PC cases can help, too, with modern designs that look as good as they feel to build in.

• MORE: CPU reviews, analysis, and buying guides
• MORE: How to check CPU temperatures
• MORE: How to choose a motherboard
• MORE: CPU price index
• MORE: AMD vs Intel

As we inch closer to CES 2026 next month, the rumor mill surrounding Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake refresh churns intensely. Just a few days ago, we covered the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus appearing on Geekbench for the first time, and now that same chip, alongside the rumored flagship Core Ultra 9 290K Plus, has been spotted at a retailer. Obligatory grain-of-salt disclaimer aside, these listings don't reveal much anyway.

Both processors were scouted by veteran tipster @momomo_us at a popular Indian vendor named Prime ABGB, replete with 3-year warranties, but they were curiously listed without any identifiers. For instance, the Intel Product Code — similar to AMD's OPNs — is mentioned on the box and can be easily noted down to put up in the listing, so the lackthereof suggests that perhaps these are just preliminary entries, rather than a leak of any official information.

Regardless, pages for the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 9 290K Plus, respectively, still list the CPU specs, which align closely with the leaks we've seen so far. Perhaps that's another indicator that the info may be pulled from what already exists online, and doesn't come from Intel or an official source directly. That, and the fact that there's no price mentioned, it says "Call for Price" for both.

Not only that, but the 290K Plus has more specs mentioned than the 270K Plus, correlating with the fact that there's more info about it online right now. Keeping that in mind, both processors are listed as 24-core SKUs with an 8P+16E config. The 290K Plus has a listed max clock of 5.8 GHz via Thermal Velocity Boost — 100 MHz higher than the 285K it's succeeding — while the listing for the 270K Plus denotes a 5.5 GHz Turbo Boost Max — same as the outgoing 265K.

Power and memory support listed for both chips is identical, 125W PL1 and 250W PL2, as is native DDR5-7200 capability, though finding a fast memory kit today is likely going to bankrupt you. The rest of the specs, like individual P-Core and E-Core frequencies, match previous leaks, and we've added a table at the end so you can tally the above screenshots with it.

The last bit of evidence against these product pages pertains to the little overview they've mentioned for the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus listing. That text is pulled straight from our very own coverage from last month; word for word. It's safe to say that the information here is borrowed (at best), but the availability might not be, considering the scale of the retailer. CES is right around the corner, so we'll find out soon enough. At the very least, we can deduce that retailers are getting ready for a seemingly imminent launch of new Intel chips.

Intel is currently preparing to launch a refreshed version of its existing Arrow Lake lineup next year for desktop, with minor improvements in binning and tuning across the board. We already detailed three chips from this family in a previous leak — one of them was the high-end Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, which has now been spotted on Geekbench for the first time, with seemingly respectable scores to boot. Remember that this is not an official announcement, so take the news with some skepticism.

For some context, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is supposed to succeed the Core Ultra 7 265K, but with four extra efficiency cores and slight clock adjustments. That makes the 270K Plus a 24-core chip, compared to its outgoing 20-core sibling. Intel has also increase the E-core base and turbo clocks by 100 MHz, and upped DDR5 support from 6400 MT/s to 7200 MT/s.

Specs-wise, we're looking at 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores that can boost up to 5.4 GHz. All of this should combine to offer a small jump in performance, which the new Geekbench listing confirms, and the data even shows it hitting almost 5.5 GHz in the tests.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus scored 3,235 points in the single-core test and 21,368 points in the multi-core test. Tallying that with the average scores on Geekbench and you can see those results beat out the Core Ultra 7 265K by 5.6% and 4.2%, respectively and that's despite using slow memory. The test was conducted on a Gigabyte Z890 Eagle WiFi7 motherboard outfitted with 64 GB of 4800 MT/s DDR5, so you can expect just a bit more juice with even faster RAM.

Those numbers are decent and these processors will launch on the current-gen LGA 1851 socket, so it can be a drop-in upgrade for many, though it won't make sense if you're already on 14/15th Gen. At least Intel is still maintaining the "Core Ultra 200" naming scheme to indicate it's not a true next-gen product. It's hard to imagine this release stirring up the market in any way, especially with how dominant AMD is right now, so it's best to consider the Arrow Lake refresh as a stopgap till Nova Lake surfaces.

Intel this week reiterated that it cannot meet demand for all of its client and data center processors due to insufficient supply, and specifically mentioned that it could use more Core Ultra 200-series Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake wafers to increase shipments of appropriate processors. Logic tiles of both CPUs are made by TSMC, whereas packaging is performed by Intel in-house, so when placing orders with the foundry, Intel was more conservative than it should have been.

"If we had more Lunar Lake wafers, we would be selling more Lunar Lake, if we had more Arrow Lake wafers, we would be selling more Arrow Lake," said John Pitzer, Corporate Vice President of Corporate Planning and Investor Relations at Intel, at UBS Global Technology and AI Conference 2025. "I think we feel pretty good about where we are in the AI PC transition."

While the PC market is no longer growing at a high pace, demand for client systems appears to be so strong that Intel cannot meet it. One of the reasons for this is that the company outsources production of chiplets for Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors to TSMC, and the allocation of wafers that Intel has access to is not enough for the company to meet demand for its products.

Both Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake use TSMC's N3B (3nm-class) manufacturing technology, which is one of the most sophisticated production nodes that the foundry has. TSMC's advanced fabs tend to be fully utilized, so Intel cannot get extra capacity quickly. Therefore, while the company expects growth of Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake supply in the fourth quarter and onwards, it did not say that it would be enough to meet all of the backlog demand. The good news: Intel has enough LPDDR5X memory for its Lunar Lake CPUs that carry on-package DRAM, so the company's costs for these CPUs are not going to increase in the short term.

That said, it remains to be seen whether and when Intel hikes prices of its client CPUs over time amid insufficient supply, high DRAM prices, and DRAM shortages.

Although Intel has invested billions in equipping its fabs with the latest equipment, such as ASML's EUV lithography tools, the majority of Intel's fabs can only produce chips on its 10nm-class process technologies — such as 10nm SuperFin and Intel 7 (aka 10nm Enhanced SuperFin) — using DUV tools. As a consequence, the company cannot meet all the demand for its Xeon 6 'Granite Rapids' processors that use Intel 3 fabrication technology.

"The vast majority of our capacity today is still on Intel 7, 10nm and that is why we are tightest there," said Pitzer. "Quite frankly, if we had more Granite [Rapids] wafers, we would be selling more Granite Rapids. We feel very good about where we are in the initial phase of the Granite [Rapids] ramp, which is our latest generation server part."

This is not the first time that Intel has complained that it cannot meet demand for all of its products. At its most recent earnings call, the company said it reallocated its internal Intel 7 wafers for Xeon 6 'Granite Rapids' processors that use Intel 7-based I/O tile.

After what could only be described as an underwhelming release, Intel is ready to refresh its Arrow Lake-S lineup of desktop CPUs with three new models, all set to bring marginal improvements. According to Videocardz, the company is preparing the Core Ultra 290K Plus, Core Ultra 270K Plus, and Core Ultra 250K Plus processors as the final products to launch on the outgoing LGA 1851 socket, soon to be replaced with LGA 1954 for Nova Lake. Let's break it all down.

The first SKU is the Core Ultra 290K Plus, which will be "replacing" (read: succeeding) the current-gen Core Ultra 285K. It has the same 8P+16E core count, but the P-Core turbo has been bumped 100 MHz to 5.6 GHz, and the E-Core now turbos at up to 4.8 GHz, up from 4.6 GHz. The Thermal Velocity Boost (TVB) — which can take the clocks of certain, cherry-picked cores even higher than the max turbo — is now rated 5.8 GHz, compared to 5.7 GHz on the 285K.

Next up is the Core Ultra 270K Plus, coming in place of the Core Ultra 265K. It takes the core count from 8P+12E to 8P+16E, matching the Core Ultra 9 SKUs. The 270K Plus has the same max turbo and P-Core boost, but a 100 MHz higher E-Core turbo. Interestingly, it actually drops the base clocks for both core types marginally. Given those details, there is reason to speculate that the 270K Plus might just be a lower-binned 285K.

Lastly, we have the Core Ultra 250K Plus, a slightly upgraded Core Ultra 245K, or perhaps even a binned-down Core Ultra 265K. The core config sees minor changes, going from 6P+8E to 6P+12E with 100 MHz increments in both E-Core and P-Core boost clocks, along with a 100 MHz decrease in E-Core base speeds. The maximum turbo and TVB are unknown for this model, the latter of which we expect to be at least 100 MHz higher as well.

All of these SKUs will come with DDR4-7200 support, a sizable 800 MT/s uplift from Arrow Lake's maximum of 6400 MT/s, though how much of that can even translate to real-world improvements — given the current memory shortage — remains to be seen. Intel has kept the same power limits for the refreshed models as the current Arrow Lake lineup across both base and turbo wattages.

As for how these chips will be marketed, it's refreshing to see Intel not label them as Core Ultra 300 (which Panther Lake already is) and stick with the 200 branding, but with a "Plus" modifier to indicate these are slightly upgraded SKUs. The Raptor Lake refresh was designated 14th Gen, even though it was barely changed from the 13th Gen. We might even see these new SKUs mix with the existing Arrow Lake lineup, which has received various updates since launch to improve performance.

Speaking of, a previous GeekBench listing for the Core Ultra 270K Plus revealed its single-core and multi-core scores already, which sat somewhere between the 285K and 265K. We can, therefore, expect minute uplifts across the board with Arrow Lake 2.0. Thanks to fierce competition from AMD, pricing will largely dictate how well these models perform in the market, but we have no details on that yet.

It seems that Intel might have a few more chips left in its bag of Arrow Lake-S processors, as a brand new SKU has made its way to the cross-platform benchmarking tool Geekbench. First spotted and shared by Benchleaks on X, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus seems like an enhanced version of the existing Core Ultra 7 265K.

According to the benchmark listing, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus scored 22,206 points in multi-core and 3,205 points in single-core tests, making it almost 10% faster than the Core Ultra 7 265 K's typical scores on the same compute benchmark.

Additional details confirm that the CPU features 24 cores (8P + 16E), 24 threads, and a maximum boost clock of 5.5 GHz. The CPU was tested with 48GB of DDR5 memory at 7,182 MT/s and an RTX 5090D GPU in a Lenovo-branded system, meaning that the CPU could potentially be exclusive to system integrators. The faster memory support also suggests that this particular CPU could be a part of an Arrow Lake refresh, as the current lineup of chips supports up to DDR5 6,400 MT/s memory.

The Intel Core Ultra 200S series officially launched in October 2024, marking the debut of the Arrow Lake desktop lineup and Intel’s first chiplet-based architecture for consumer CPUs. The release came at a critical time for the company, following a difficult financial quarter and mounting competition from AMD. Unfortunately, Arrow Lake failed to deliver the kind of turnaround it was hoping for as early sales tapered off within weeks of launch, and the chips struggled to gain traction even months later as buyers continued to favor older Raptor Lake models.

If the leaked benchmarks hold any authenticity, Intel might be preparing more SKUs under the Arrow Lake branding to potentially address the shortcomings of its current lineup. Whether the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus becomes part of that effort remains to be seen, but the company clearly isn’t ready to move on from Arrow Lake just yet.

Intel revealed new information about its upcoming Panther Lake chips made on its new 18A node at an event in Arizona, including claims that the chips can deliver 50% more performance at similar power to its Lunar Lake chips or reduce power by 30% in multi-threaded work compared to its Arrow Lake-H processors. Going by past Intel launch cycles, we're likely to hear more about these chips at CES 2026. Intel says "broad market availability" will start in January 2026.

These sorts of improvements are badly needed because, in recent years, Intel has faced a triple threat in the laptop processor market. AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple all want a piece of the lucrative premium laptop pie, and especially in the case of Qualcomm and Apple, the arrival of high-performance, highly efficient Arm cores on SoCs boasting powerful NPUs and GPUs has forced Intel to up every part of its game to stay competitive on performance and battery life.

Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake Core Ultra CPUs proved that relatively short battery life wasn't an inherent problem of Intel x86 products, but the highly integrated design of Lunar Lake SoCs (combining both compute and memory on a single package) meant that laptop OEMs didn't have nearly as much flexibility and control over system configurations and costs as they might get with a Meteor Lake or Arrow Lake CPU and discrete memory packages, whether in soldered or SO-DIMM flavors.

In exchange for that greater flexibility in memory configurations, Arrow Lake-H SoCs come with tradeoffs of their own. Arrow Lake systems certainly don't have bad battery life, but Lunar Lake is still the best thing going for unplugged efficiency from Intel CPUs.

Lunar Lake also includes a GPU built on Intel's latest Xe2 graphics architecture, while Arrow Lake-H CPUs use an older, larger Xe-LPG+ GPU, which has its roots in first-gen Arc Alchemist products, to deliver relatively similar performance (but likely with worse power efficiency).

Arrow Lake-H also carries over Meteor Lake's rather limited pair of Crestmont E-cores in its low-power island, even as its on-die E-cores got an upgrade to the more advanced Skymont microarchitecture that also underpins the quartet of low-power E-cores on Lunar Lake. Are you lost yet?

This dizzying mix of performance levels, power efficiency targets, architectural generations, and system configuration restrictions across Intel mobile platforms is a headache for consumers and laptop makers alike.

Enter Panther Lake, the great unifier that Intel hopes will bring the best of Lunar Lake's power efficiency improvements and Arrow Lake's performance scalability together in one common package.

Panther Lake SoCs are all built up from the same cutting-edge P-cores, E-cores, and iGPU architecture, while affording laptop makers more freedom to tailor their products to a wider range of buyers and price points. And as Intel's first product to ship with a compute tile fabricated on the latest 18A process node, Panther Lake has a ton to prove.

At its most recent Tech Tour event, held in the backyard of its leading-edge fabs in Chandler, Arizona, Intel walked us through everything that makes Panther Lake tick. Here’s the story so far.

Intel's 18A process ramps up

Panther Lake's compute tile is one of the first products to be fabricated on Intel's leading-edge 18A node. As a quick refresher, 18A is Intel's (and likely the industry's) first high-volume process to incorporate two major innovations meant to enable future scaling and power efficiency gains: gate-all-around (GAA) transistors, which Intel calls RibbonFETs, and a backside power delivery network, which Intel calls PowerVia.

Intel describes its RibbonFETs as "the ultimate transistor," since their gate structure allows for what the company calls "complete control" over the channel. Compared to FinFETs, whose gate structure doesn't extend to the bottom of the channel and therefore has a "weak point" for controlling leakage current, the RibbonFET gate structure entirely wraps around the channel (as defined by the stack of silicon nanosheets at the heart of the device), minimizing undesirable leakage current when the transistor is off. Among other important characteristics, less leakage current means less energy wasted while a chip is operating.

Intel also claims that RibbonFETs are more flexible for designers than FinFETs. The number of ribbons, as well as their widths, can be adjusted to tailor the transistor's performance characteristics to the needs of a given cell.

PowerVia, Intel's implementation of a backside power delivery network, introduces a second novel approach to chip fabrication. As silicon processes have gotten denser and denser, efficiently routing both signal and power wires above the transistors has gotten more and more challenging as those wires compete for ever more precious real estate.

Instead of building up both power and signal wires above the transistor, the backside power delivery approach first creates the transistors and signal wiring on the front side of the wafer. In the next production step, the wafer gets flipped over, and the back side gets polished away until the transistor contacts are revealed. The power delivery metal layers are then connected directly to the transistors.

Intel says that PowerVia allows for 10% higher density and relaxed routing on the front side of the wafer. For power delivery, the back-side metal layers reduce power loss from the package to the transistor by 30%.

All in all, 18A allows for a 15% higher frequency at the same power as Intel 3 and a 1.3x density improvement compared to the same process. Designers can also choose to harness 18A's advances to deliver a 25% power reduction at the same performance level compared to Intel 3.

Cougar Cove P-cores and Darkmont E-cores: evolution, not revolution

Intel didn't go into fine detail on the changes it made to the Cougar Cove P-core on Panther Lake versus Lunar and Arrow Lake's Lion Cove, or Panther's Darkmont E-core versus Skymont. The improvements the company did discuss for the Cougar Cove P-core are typical refinements of an existing CPU architecture, such as an improved branch predictor and a more capacious translation lookaside buffer (TLB). As Intel says, "we didn't go in and change the width, we didn't change the depth, we optimized."

At a high level, Intel says that Cougar Cove now employs an "AI-based" power management approach that can adjust the aggressiveness of certain functional units, such as the prefetcher, on the fly in response to the demands of diverse workloads.

Another change in Cougar Cove is improved prediction behavior in some cases of memory disambiguation. As Intel puts it, when a processor is executing a program, it will perform load and store instructions for memory accesses; sometimes those instructions are connected. Cougar Cove has improved logic to predict when a load and store are connected and use that information to schedule the load correctly. When this prediction is correct, it can result in higher IPC.

Intel also notes that the move to the 18A process gave it the ability to grow some fundamental structures in Cougar Cove, and the TLB was one of the primary beneficiaries. A bigger TLB means that more complex workloads run faster and more reliably, according to Intel.

Cougar Cove also carries forward and refines branch prediction changes introduced with Lion Cove in Lunar Lake. Lion Cove featured improved branch prediction algorithms and delivered low-latency predictions even for branches far ahead in the instruction stream. Intel says Cougar Cove incorporates lessons it learned from shipping Lion Cove silicon to improve performance. It refined some branch prediction algorithms and grew the sizes of each level in the predictor to further lower latency. Cougar Cove can also store better metadata about past prediction results to improve accuracy.

Intel says this all means the Cougar Cove branch predictor can deliver lower latency, more prediction bandwidth, and higher prediction accuracy. These improvements positively impact energy efficiency and performance— a more accurate and more responsive predictor means the CPU core spends less time doing wasteful work and more time doing useful work.

Improvements in the Darkmont E-core are also largely evolutionary versus Lunar Lake’s Skymont. As with Cougar Cove, Darkmont can now use a dynamic algorithm to adjust the aggressiveness of its prefetcher to better balance responsiveness and power efficiency in response to the demands of varying workloads.

Like Cougar Cove, Darkmont offers improved branch prediction accuracy. It also saves power in the front end by employing loop stream detection, a technique that allows the front end of the chip to power down during certain instruction sequences. Darkmont also broadens the cases where the chip can employ nanocode sequences to execute complex instructions that traditionally would have been handled by an x86 CPU's microcode engine. Nanocode was introduced in Skymont to improve both performance and power efficiency.

As Intel puts it, the microcode sequencer is a giant ROM that comes into play when certain complex x86 instructions need to be executed. Loading from that ROM is a serial process, and it can only service one decoder at a time, meaning that other front end units will be blocked if they were also to need instruction sequences from the microcode ROM at the same time. Nanocode prevents this blocking behavior by taking some of those microcode instructions and embedding them into programmable logic arrays in each of the three front-end decoders of the E-core.

Since those PLAs are present in each of the three front-ends of the Darkmont core, Intel says the core can run instructions that formerly resided in microcode as "parallel, out-of-order microcode-like sequences." Intel says Darkmont has more cases and more optimized cases where its front-ends can employ nanocode and leave the microcode sequencer alone.

Mix and match

Not every part of a Panther Lake SoC uses 18A, of course. Intel uses the same "disaggregated architecture" concept that debuted in Meteor Lake and was refined on Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake. This approach separates different functional units of an SoC into individually fabricated "tiles" that are made in Intel's own fabs or at foundries like TSMC, then joined together using Intel's Foveros packaging technology.

In turn, each Panther Lake compute tile, fabricated in-house on 18A, is built up from three basic core complexes. A compute tile can (so far) include up to four Cougar Cove P-cores, up to eight Darkmont E-cores, and a separate "low-power island" cluster of four more Darkmont E-cores that are meant to "confine" suitable workloads to a lower-power compute domain for extra battery life, an idea introduced in Meteor Lake and refined further in Lunar Lake.

Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake both relied on a pair of Crestmont E-cores in this island that were limited in both power and clock speeds to maximize energy savings, but their limited performance meant that more power-hungry parts of the chip might be awakened more often if a task exceeded their limited capabilities. Lunar Lake got four Skymont E-cores in this island with their own power rail, which allowed them to be clocked higher and do more demanding work before tasks had to be shifted to the P-cores on that SoC.

As an evolution of Skymont, Panther Lake's Darkmont low-power E-cores allow more demanding tasks to stay confined to the low-power island for longer, and they can contribute to multi-threaded workloads for extra parallelism when it's needed. They're not on the main ring bus that connects the main clusters of P- and E-cores on the Panther Lake SoC, however, so they don't share the L3 cache of the larger core cluster. Instead, they have access to a power-efficient 8MB "memory-side cache" that's shared with all the other compute agents on the tile.

This side cache is coherent with the rest of the cache hierarchy across the chip, and coherence among all the caches on Panther Lake is managed by a home agent that communicates with separate coherency agents on each compute domain.

The 18A compute tiles also include Intel's fifth-generation NPU, seventh-generation image processing unit (IPU) for use with premium webcams in laptops, and Xe media and display engines separated from the graphics tile.

For more information on the Xe3 graphics architecture and the two iGPUs that use it on Panther Lake, as well as software and power management improvements, check out our dedicated article.

Three's a crowd

So far, Intel has created two different 18A compute dies that it mixes and matches with two different integrated GPUs (and possibly two different I/O tiles) to create three distinct Panther Lake SoCs, each with different cost and performance targets.

The smallest Panther Lake SoC has four P-cores paired with four low-power E-cores, just like we saw with Lunar Lake. Intel didn't disclose the full specs of its cache hierarchy, but since it lacks higher-power E-core clusters with their own L3 cache, our educated guess is this chip likely only has 12MB of cache shared across its four P-cores. It includes a small Xe3 GPU that offers up to four Xe3 graphics cores. This chip can use traditional DDR5 SO-DIMMs or LPCAMM modules at speeds up to 6800 MT/s, or soldered LPDDR5X running at up to 6400 MT/s.

For storage and peripheral controllers, the platform controller tile on the baby Panther Lake SoC offers 12 PCIe lanes - four Gen 5 and eight Gen 4 - which is enough to connect a Gen 5 SSD and perhaps lower-end storage devices or a discrete GPU. Between its relatively low core count, modest graphics horsepower, and limited memory speeds, we're likely to see this chip in more entry-level laptops that prioritize light weight and battery life over absolute performance.

The midsize Panther Lake SoC adds eight E-cores on a ring bus shared with the four P-cores, in addition to the four low-power E-cores in their dedicated island. Intel says this compute die has up to 18MB of shared L3 across the P- and E-cores. This midsize SoC keeps the same 4 Xe Core graphics tile as the small SoC.

This chip can take advantage of faster memory than its smaller sibling. Like the small chip, it can use both DDR5 modules or soldered LPDDR5X, but it supports DDR5 at speeds up to 7200 MT/s and LPDDR5X at up to 8533 MT/s.

The midsize Panther Lake chip also has expanded PCIe connectivity from its larger platform controller tile: as many as eight PCIe Gen 4 lanes and 12 Gen 5 lanes. Intel wouldn't comment on particular Panther Lake OEM designs in the pipeline, but between its expanded compute resources, richer PCIe connectivity, and support for higher-speed memory versus its smaller sibling, this chip seems well-suited for pairing with a discrete GPU in thin and light laptops, an approach that some Intel partners took with Meteor Lake chips.

The largest Panther Lake SoC retains the same 4P+8E+4LPE CPU core configuration as the midsize SoC but adds a much larger and more powerful 12 Xe3 Core GPU to the package. Intel restricts the memory options that partners can employ with this chip, likely so that it can get adequate memory bandwidth to feed all of those GPU execution units. It can only use LPDDR5X memory and supports the fastest transfer rates of any Panther Lake product: up to 9600 MT/s.

This big chip drops back to the more limited I/O tile with eight PCIe Gen 4 and four PCIe Gen 5 lanes, which is likely an indication that it's targeted at the exploding handheld gaming market and premium thin-and-light laptops that can still game when needed. Pairing discrete GPUs with this version of Panther Lake doesn't make a ton of sense from a system design standpoint.

Performance projections

Intel offered a high-level preview of single-threaded performance with Cougar Cove, suggesting that the new P-core can deliver 10% higher performance at similar power to Lunar and Arrow Lake, or 40% lower power at similar performance in less demanding workloads.

The multi-threaded performance story for Panther Lake is a bit muddier. Intel claims that Panther Lake can deliver 50% more performance at similar power to Lunar Lake, or 30% lower power for multi-threaded performance similar to Arrow Lake-H.

Of course, if we consider these charts in their entirety, Panther Lake can also deliver higher absolute performance at similar power to Arrow Lake-H, emphasizing the greater performance scalability of what we assume to be the 4P+8E+4LPE package.

Beyond these broad and rosy performance projections, Intel didn't discuss any specifics on clocks or power targets for Panther Lake during its presentations, but as with any modern laptop SoC, the frequency, power and thermal targets for these chips are likely to cover such a broad range of designs that it's hard to make generalized statements about their performance, and that's before we get into individual chip models within the product stack.

We'll have to wait and see what types of systems Intel's partners typically produce with Panther Lake SoCs inside before we can even begin to establish performance ballparks. Intel says that the first Panther Lake chips will ship before the end of 2025, and that it expects broad market availability starting in January 2026. Given that timeframe, it's probably safe to say that we will hear much more about Panther Lake products at CES.

Intel’s entry-level desktop processor from the latest Arrow Lake lineup has dropped to its lowest price yet of under $170 on Amazon. The Core Ultra 5 225F originally launched at a recommended price range of $221-$231, before witnessing a price cut to $194.32 back in July. With this latest discount, customers are saving roughly $50 to $60, or better than 25% off the original launch price, making it one of the best deals on Intel’s new-generation CPUs.

The Core Ultra 5 225F is essentially the non-integrated GPU variant of the Core Ultra 5 225, which means that users will require a dedicated graphics card, not just for performance but to actually see anything. The processor comes with 10-cores and 10-threads, with six E-cores and four E-cores. With a 4.9 GHz boost clock speed and a 65W PBP (Processor Base Power), the CPU offers performance that is identical to the Core Ultra 5 225.

• Check out this deal on Amazon

The CPU supports up to 256 GB of DDR5 6400 MT/s memory, and features a dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit) that is capable of up to 13 TOPS (Int8) of performance. It also offers full support for PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 devices with a maximum of 24 PCIe lanes, depending on the motherboard it is paired with. Speaking of which, Intel’s Core Ultra 200S processors, require an Intel 800-series motherboard which includes Z890, B860, and H810.

At its current price, the Core Ultra 5 225F should be an obvious choice for anyone who is planning to build a new PC on a nominal budget. While AMD does offer some competition in the entry-segment with its latest Ryzen 5 9600X, it only offers a total of six cores and is currently selling at a more expensive price of $199 on Amazon.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

Intel isn’t done with Arrow Lake yet. After having launched a total of 22 locked and unlocked SKUs since last year's not-so-incredible launch, the company is now looking forward to the next wave. According to ZDNet Korea, a refresh of the Arrow Lake-S desktop lineup is reportedly set for release in the second half of 2025, and while it won’t introduce new core architectures, it will bring minor upgrades to (try to) stay competitive, including a bulked-up NPU that supports CoPilot+. Expect slightly higher clock speeds thanks to better silicon binning and refinements on the Intel 20A process, which introduced RibbonFET and PowerVia in Arrow Lake’s initial release.

This new report comes after a previous leak from @momomo_us, who shared motherboard reference documents revealing the existence of Arrow Lake 2.0, if you will. As such, the refresh will remain on the LGA 1851 socket and continue to use 800-series chipsets, ensuring that current motherboards remain fully compatible and extend their life for one final generation before Nova Lake replaces them next year.

Core configurations reportedly won’t change—Lion Cove P-cores and Skymont E-cores are staying the same—but firmware and tuning optimizations will likely lead to a boost in efficiency. Intel has been trying its best to gain whatever ground possible when it comes to squeezing more juice out of Arrow Lake with updates like Core Boost 200S at Computex earlier this year, and "IPO" optimized memory profiles that are currently live in China with various system integrators.

Moreover, one notable upgrade is the rumored new NPU4, which would make its debut on Arrow Lake-S refresh after its introduction in last year's Lunar Lake mobile chips. The original Arrow Lake desktop CPUs shipped with NPU3 (from Meteor Lake) which only had 13 TOPS of AI power, short of Microsoft’s Copilot+ AI PC requirements of at least 40 TOPS. The refresh is expected to surpass that with 48 TOPS, which will be able to handle the increasing demands of local AI workloads. With AI features becoming more central to consumer usage, this NPU upgrade is likely Intel’s main play. It should allow the company to brand these chips as AI-ready.

There’s no indication yet of how Intel will brand the refresh—whether it’ll fall under the same Core Ultra 200 series umbrella or branch off as a new tier—but this is more of an iterative performance uplift than a fully-blown new generation. It’s likely a strategic move to extend Arrow Lake’s shelf life while the company gears up for Nova Lake, which is still expected in 2026 on the Intel 18A node.

ZDNet Korea also reported that Intel's actual next-gen architecture is still more than a year away since the launch is currently scheduled for H2 2026. Till then, Intel's declining market share will have to cling on for dear life as the market continues to see red.

An alleged picture of the socket that is expected to host Intel's next-generation Diamond Rapids (Xeon seventhgeneration) family of server CPUs has emerged, as spotted by HXL on X. The LGA9324 socket reportedly carries over 10,000 pins, once you consider debug pins and the like. This will likely be the largest LGA CPU socket yet, unless future Venice offerings from AMD exceed this amount.

Last August, test tool listings for partners indicated that Intel's future Diamond Rapids processors will reportedly require a new Oak Stream platform with its LGA9324 socket. Under the Xeon 7 family, these CPUs are expected to supersede existing Granite Rapids offerings, across AP (Advanced Performance) Xeon 6900P and SP (Scalable Performance) Xeon 6700P/6500P offerings. Prototype cooler designs from Dynatron suggest Intel will fragment Diamond Rapids into AP and SP flavors, and so we might see a toned-down socket under the Oak Stream family for Diamond Rapids-SP.

Currently, Intel's largest socket, LGA7529, features at least 7,529 contacts, while AMD's SP5 offers 6,096. Xeon 6900P CPUs, utilizing the LGA7529 socket, offer up to 128 P-cores, support 12 DDR5 memory channels, and can reach a TDP of 500W. With a nearly 30% increase in pin-counts, expect more I/O, memory channels, increased TDPs, and even core counts. While we don't have a banana for scale, visually, this is a massive socket, dwarfing LGA1851 (used by Arrow Lake) by almost five times.

Acer is kicking off its Computex announcements with a pair of 14-inch gaming laptops. The company's two new gaming laptops, the Predator Triton 14 AI and Helios Neo 14 AI, are both being targeted at both gamers and creative professionals.

The Triton 14 AI is extremely sleek (0.68 inches at its thickest point), but to get there, Acer is using a productivity-class processor. The Intel Core Ultra 9 288V is one of Intel's "Lunar Lake" processors with integrated RAM. This chip runs between 30W at base power, which isn't as powerful as most gaming laptop processors. We saw a similar case in the Razer Blade 16, which opted for a 28W AMD Ryzen chip to enable a thinner design.

Acer is using graphene on the CPU to serve as the thermal interface material, which the company says outperforms regular thermal paste by 14.5%.

Acer is pairing Lunar Lake with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU using Nvidia's Studio drivers, which are optimized for creative applications. The system goes up to 32GB of RAM (on the CPU) and 2TB of storage.

The Triton also features a 14.5-inch, 2880 x 1800 OLED touchscreen that runs up to 120 Hz and is Calman verified.There's also a haptic touchpad built into the wrist rest, similar to the MSI Titan and Dell XPS 13, that supports a stylus, which seems limited in terms of writing.

The system looks sleek, with a sparse design and a silver hinge with diamond cut edge designed to reflect different colors from different angles. Despite the slim design, you still get some gaming accouterments, like a per-key RGB keyboard.

If you want a more traditional gaming laptop, the Helios Neo 14 AI is a bit more conventional in its components. Here, Acer is using Intel's H-series "Arrow Lake" chips, going up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H, though still using up to 32GB of RAM, up to 2 TB of storage, and up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU. It's also thicker than the Triton at 0.82 inches.

The Helios Neo will have two screen options. You get a 14.5-inch panel either way, but one is 2880 x 1800 at 120 Hz with a MUX switch (that typically requires rebooting the system), while a lower-res 2560 x 1600 option is faster at 165 Hz and uses Nvidia's Advanced Optimus to switch between the integrated GPU and the discrete one.

The Predator Helios Neo has a metal lid with an RGB logo that you can customize, as well as a three-zone RGB keyboard.

Of the two laptops, only the Triton is certified as a Copilot+ PC. The Lunar Lake NPU, at 48 TOPS, is far more powerful than the Arrow Lake's 13 TOPS. Microsoft's Copilot+ PC requirements demand a minimum of 40 TOPS.

Acer is also using Computex to update its Predator Orion 3000 to the latest chips from Intel and Nvidia, including up to an Intel Core Ultra 7 265F and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070.

The company hasn't announced North American pricing or release dates for any of these machines. Acer said it will release that information for the U.S. and Canada "closer to market availability." In Europe, the systems will launch in July, which might give us a rough window of when to expect them elsewhere.

MSI has confirmed it will take the covers off a host of exciting new products at Computex 2025 later this month, including a brand new desktop AI supercomputer powered by Nvidia's DGX Spark platform.

The company confirmed in a press release that it will unveil its EdgeXpert MS-C931, a new desktop AI supercomputer built on the Nvidia DG Spark platform. The MS-C931 is powered by Nvidia's GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip and is capable of 1,000 AI TOPS FP4 performance. The GB10 SoC features Nvidia Blackwell GPU architecture and fifth-generation Tensor Cores, as well as NVLink-C2C connection to Nvidia's Grace CPU, an Arm architecture core featuring 20 power-efficient chips.

It will also feature ConnectX 7 networking, 128GB unified memory, and LLM support, which Nvidia has previously promised can support up to 4TB of NVMe storage, and can run up to 200-billion-parameter LLMs, or 405-billion parameter models when running two linked chips.

Nvidia's DGX Spark platform promises compact and efficient performance, and comes pre-installed with Nvidia's AI software stack so that developers can run AI models from all the major players, including DeepSeek, Meta, and Google.

Alongside the MS-C931, MSI also says it will unveil a new lineup of Industrial Motherboards, as well as systems powered by Intel Twin Lake, Raptor Lake Refresh, Bartlett Lake, and Arrow Lake processor families.

Specifically, the company highlighted three new products. The MS-C926 is an ultra-slim fanless box PC with applications in smart retail and digital signage.

The Ms-927 is an ultra-compact box PC featuring Intel Core Ultra processors for high-performance edge computing.

Finally, the MS-CF20 is a new next-generation ATX motherboard featuring 16th Gen Intel Arrow Lake-S processors.

MSI says it will also have live demonstrations for solutions for smart retail and digital signage. There will also be a new fanless palm box for "space-constrained industrial environments, remote control management solutions utilizing SysLink, and edge AI innovations, including LLM and chatbot applications enabled by AI smartLink software.

While Jiushark isn’t well known in U.S. enthusiast and PC building circles, we’ve covered the company in the past, highlighting some of its unique products like the Jiushark M.2 Three, an M.2 SSD cooler that uses a dual heatpipe radiator and fan, much like a mini CPU cooler. We’ve also tested the JF13K Diamond low-profile CPU cooler.

Today, we’re looking at the new Jiushark JF800 Diamond dual-tower air cooler, available in white and black, with the company claiming cooling capabilities of up to 280W!

Will Jiushark’s latest make our list of best CPU coolers on the market? There’s no question that it deserves a shot because, spoiler, this is the strongest performing dual-tower cooler we’ve ever tested, on both Intel Raptor Lake and Arrow Lake CPUs. But it’s also pretty hard to come by in the U.S., unless you’re willing to order it directly from China.

Let’s take a look at the specifications and features of the cooler. Then we’ll go over thermal performance and noise levels.

Cooler specifications

Packing and included contents

Opening the compact box reveals the accessories, neatly packaged above the cooler.

Included in the box are the following:

• Two 120 mm fans
• Dual-tower heatsink
• Thermal paste
• Mounting accessories for modern AMD and Intel platforms
• Installation manual

Features of Jiushark’s JF800 Diamond

*️⃣ Six copper heatpipes

The Jiushark JF800 Diamond moves heat away from the CPU using six copper heatpipes – but as you’ll see in our benchmarks, it offers performance superior to similar air coolers we’ve tested.

*️⃣ Heatsink Design

The towers of the JF800 feature what appears to be a fairly basic fin design.

The tops of the heatsinks have a grille reminiscent of cattle guards, adding some nice aesthetics with the ARGB lighting shining through them.

*️⃣ Two 120mm fans with ARGB lighting

There’s more to a cooler than just the heatsink or radiator. The bundled fans significantly impact cooling and noise levels, as well as how the cooler looks in your case. The included fans here have nine blades, and there are models with or without ARGB lighting, according to your preference.

As you’ll see in the benchmarks below, the fans help enable superior thermal performance, but can be a little noisy.

Testing configuration – Intel LGA1700 and LGA1851 platform

There are many factors other than the CPU cooler that can influence your cooling performance, including the case you use and the fans installed in it. A system's motherboard can also influence this, especially if it suffers from bending, which results in poor cooler contact with the CPU.

To prevent bending from impacting our cooling results, we’ve installed Thermalright’s LGA 1700 contact frame into our testing rig. If your motherboard is affected by bending, your thermal results will be worse than those shown below.

Not all motherboards are affected equally by this issue. I tested Raptor Lake CPUs on two motherboards. And while one showed significant thermal improvements after installing Thermalright’s LGA1700 contact frame, the other motherboard showed no temperature diffrence! Check out our review of the contact frame for more information.

I’ve also tested this cooler with Intel’s latest platform, Arrow Lake and the LGA 1851 socket.

LGA 1700 and 1851 installation

The installation of this air cooler is easy with the included mounting hardware.

1. You’ll first need to place the backplate against the rear of the motherboard after assembling it.

2. Next, you’ll need to take the rubber standoffs and slide them against the poles of the backplate.

3. Then, you’ll take the mounting bars and place them on top of the rubber standoffs, securing them with the included screws.

4. Apply the included thermal paste to your CPU. If you have any questions on how to do this properly, please refer to our handy how to apply thermal paste guide.

5. Remove the middle fan from the cooler, then place the cooler on top of your CPU. Use a screwdriver to secure it using the screws in between the two towers, shown below.

6. Once complete, connect the PWM and ARGB cables to the corresponding motherboard headers. Installation is now complete.

CPU-only thermal results without power limits

Without power limits enforced on Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K and i7-14700K CPUs, the CPU will hit its peak temperature (TJ Max) and thermally throttle with with almost all air coolers and even most liquid coolers on the market. For the best liquid coolers on the market, the results of this test will be shown using the CPU’s temperature. However, when the CPU reaches its peak temperature, I’ve measured the CPU package power to determine the maximum wattage cooled to best compare their performance. It’s important to note that thermal performance can scale differently depending on the CPU it’s being tested with.

We’ll start by looking at the performance of this cooler with Intel’s Arrow Lake Core Ultra 9 285K, as these are rather interesting!

Normally, when I’ve tested air coolers with Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285k, they run with the CPU operating at peak temperature and experience small amounts of thermal throttling as a result. Every air cooler I’ve tested thus far has demonstrated this behavior – until now! When I tested Jiushark’s JF800 did momentarily peak at maximum temperature, but operated without throttling – the first air cooler I’ve tested to accomplish this.

That said, Arrow Lake’s thermal characteristics have changed a bit since the launch due to both Windows and BIOS updates, which have altered its behavior. I’m going to need to retest coolers like Thermalright’s Peerless Assassin 140 as a result. It’s quite possible that other coolers can also manage this feat with Arrow Lake now.

Again, CPU coolers can scale (and perform) differently depending on the CPU they are paired with due to differences in manufacturing processes and the location of hotspots on the CPU. We’ve also tested Jiushark’s JF800 Diamond with the harder-to-cool Raptor Lake Core i7-14700K to see if its amazing performance would hold up with other CPUs.

With 254W cooled during the course of testing, Jiushark’s JF800 Diamond is again impressive! This is better cooling performance than I’ve seen from any other air cooler and competitive with many AIOs!

To achieve these levels of thermal performance, the fans of this cooler reach up to 48.9 dBA. This is much louder than it needs to be. I don’t understand why Jiushark allowed these fans to run so loudly, especially since – as the next section will show – they perform well even when limited to low noise levels.

CPU-only thermal results with noise normalized to 38.9 dBA

Finding the right balance between fan noise levels and cooling performance is important. While running fans at full speed can improve cooling capacity to some extent, the benefits are limited and many users prefer a quieter system.

With this noise-normalized test, I’ve set noise levels to 38.9 dBA using the i7-14700K system. This level of noise is low, but slightly audible to most people. Jiushark’s JF800 continued to offer the best performance we’ve seen from any air cooler here, with 236W cooled during this test.

253W results

My recent reviews have focused more on tests with both the CPU and GPU being stressed, but many of y’all have indicated that you would like to see more CPU-only tests. In response, I’ve started testing Intel’s “Arrow Lake” Core Ultra 9 285K with a 253W limit.

Testing with the default power limits of 253W shows very good performance, on par with Thermalright’s Peerless Assassin 140!

135W CPU + 290W GPU results

Testing a CPU Cooler in isolation is great for synthetic benchmarks, but doesn’t tell the whole story of how it will perform. I’ve incorporated two tests with a power limit imposed on the CPU, while also running a full load on MSI’s GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super 16G VENTUS 3X.

The CPU power limit of 135W was chosen based on the worst CPU power consumption I observed in gaming with Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K, which was in Rise of the Tomb Raider.

In this test, the JF800 Diamond continues to impress. With a temperature recorded of 66 degrees Celsius, it again takes the spot for the best air cooler, outperforming rival options from ID-Cooling, Thermalright, and Ocypus! Noise levels weren’t bad, but they were near the loudest of the results we’ve recorded thus far.

85W CPU + 290W GPU results

Our second round of CPU + GPU testing is also performed with Arrow Lake. The power limit of 85W was chosen based on typical power consumption in gaming scenarios using the Core Ultra 9 285K CPU. This should be fairly easy for most coolers. The main point of this test is to see how quietly (or loudly!) a cooler runs in low-intensity scenarios.

With a CPU temperature of 54 degrees C, Jiushark retains its lead over other air coolers. Its noise level was also relatively low in this test, averaging 38.2 dBA.

Conclusion

Jiushark’s JF800 Diamond is the best air cooler on the market that you can’t (easily) purchase. It outperforms its competitors in every thermal benchmark, even when the fans are noise-normalized. My only complaint is the lack of availability, at least in the U.S. If you want this amazing CPU cooler, you’ll need to import it from AliExpress or another Asian distributor, at least until there is better availability stateside.

Intel has discontinued support for its Deep Link suite of technologies, as confirmed by a representative on GitHub, via X user Haze. After Intel quietly stopped promoting the feature in newer products such as Battlemage, it has now confirmed that active development for Deep Link has ceased. While you still might be able to use Deep Link, Intel has clarified that there will be no future updates or official support from their customer service channels.

Deep Link was introduced in late 2020. It allows you to harness the combined power of your Intel CPU and Arc GPU to improve streaming, AI acceleration, and overall efficiency. To utilize Deep Link, you needed an Intel 11th, 12th, or 13th Generation CPU and a dedicated Arc Alchemist GPU. The suite offered four key utilities: Dynamic Power Share, Stream Assist, Hyper Encode, and Hyper Compute.

Dynamic Power Share optimizes performance and power by intelligently shifting power resources between the CPU and GPU. Stream Assist improved streaming by offloading the task from the dedicated GPU to the integrated GPU. Hyper Encode accelerated video encoding using multiple Intel processors. Lastly, Hyper Compute leveraged your Intel CPU and GPU to accelerate AI workloads in OpenVINO.

Noctua has created a new mounting modification for its flagship NH-D15 G2 CPU cooler tailored specifically for Core Ultra 200S series CPUs. Its new NM-IB8 mounting bars provide up to a three-degree temperature improvement by shifting the center of the NH-D15 G2's contact plate north-east of the CPU package.

The NM-IB8 mounting bars only replace the NH-D15 G2's existing units; the rest of the mounting equipment (that comes with the cooler) including the washers and screws are reused. Noctua claims the adjusted mounting spot provides a 3-degree Celsius drop in temperature with the HBC version of the NH-D15 G2 and a 1-degree Celsius drop with the standard version.

You won't typically find a Hygon processor among the list of best CPUs for gaming or other applications. Nevertheless, Hygon stands as one of China's most important fabless semiconductor companies. Hardware investigator HXL recently shared an ambitious roadmap detailing Hygon's forthcoming initiatives, including a flagship 128-core, 512-thread processor.

Baptized as the C86-5G, the upcoming server processor will feature up to 128 cores with simultaneous multithreading (SMT). However, there's a slight twist. Instead of utilizing the typical two-way SMT (SMT2) that we've grown accustomed to on modern mainstream and server chips, the C86-5G leverages four-way SMT (SMT4), which means four threads per core. That's why the C86-5G has 128 cores and 512 threads.

Manufacturers have long utilized various SMT layouts; Hygon is not introducing any innovative concepts. For instance, Intel's defunct Xeon Phi, particularly the Knights Landing variant, was equipped with an SMT4 architecture. Moreover, IBM's Power8 processors offer SMT4 capabilities and extend to SMT8.

Hygon C86-5G Specifications

The C86-5G, in contrast to its predecessor, the C86-4G, features up to twice as many cores and four times as many threads. Unfortunately, Hygon has not disclosed the specific microarchitecture utilized in the C86-5G, only mentioning that it has been "upgraded again." Consequently, the chipmaker claims that the C86-5G will significantly improve instructions per cycle (IPC) by more than 17%.

Hygon has come a long way since its first-generation server processor, which was built on the Dhyana microarchitecture derived from AMD's Zen IP. However, it seems to be a thing of the past, as Hygon's roadmap indicates that since the C86-4G model, the company has adopted a "new self-developed microarchitecture." Consequently, the C86-5G is said to employ an enhanced version of this mysterious microarchitecture.

The C86-5G has a rich feature set, including AVX-512 instructions and 16-channel DDR5-5600 support, up from the 12-channel DDR5-4800 configuration on the C86-4G. The former can substantially help the C86-5G power through server and enterprise workloads. Meanwhile, supporting 16 memory channels will allow Hygon's upcoming platform to house an enormous amount of memory. The manufacturer didn't specify which DIMM formats the C86-5G can handle, but being a server chip, it should support RDIMMs and such. But even with conventional DDR5 memory modules that have scaled up to 64GB per module, the C86-5G can have up to 1TB of DDR5-5600 at its disposal.

The earlier C86-4G model offers 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes for connectivity, matching the capacity of AMD's fourth-generation EPYC 7004 (codenamed Genoa) chips. Although the number of PCIe 5.0 lanes for the C86-5G is yet to be disclosed, Hygon has confirmed that the new flagship will support Compute Express Link 2.0 (CXL2.0). This positions the C86-5G competitively alongside the latest AMD EPYC 9005 (codenamed Turin) and Intel's 5th Gen Xeon (codenamed Emerald Rapids) processors in terms of interconnect standards.

The C86-4G has presumably been available since last year, suggesting that Hygon probably began development on the C86-5G already. However, since the roadmap is quite ambitious and lacks specific dates, we cannot determine the current status of the C86-5G.

Before the tariff conflict with the U.S., China was already pursuing technological self-sufficiency. The tariffs merely accelerated the nation's efforts to reach this goal, with companies like Hygon vital to the process. It's unrealistic to believe Hygon can launch a chip that rivals AMD's and Intel's performance levels. Nonetheless, the C86-5G seems to compare well with competitors in terms of features, at least. Considering the current landscape, we expect to see C86-5G benchmarks soon.

Today, we'll put the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D vs the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K in a heated contest to see which chip comes out on top. The best processor is not necessarily the one with the most number of cores or the highest clock speeds; rather, it is the one that fulfills your specific requirements and fits within your budget. Gamers do not necessarily require the highest-end chip to enjoy the latest AAA games, although having one wouldn't hurt. However, numerous compelling reasons exist for a consumer to seek to acquire a flagship processor.

You may be part of a small, elite crowd of enthusiastic gamers with the financial capacity to acquire the latest and greatest mainstream processor. Alternatively, you could be among the type of users who use their systems for more than just casual gaming, thereby warranting a more substantial investment in a processor that provides considerable processing power alongside exceptional gaming performance. The million-dollar question remains whether to choose between Intel or AMD, as both chipmakers have released highly compelling flagship processors in the current market.

AMD currently has two coexisting mainstream processor lineups in the retail market. The vanilla Ryzen 9000 (codename Granite Ridge) series was the inaugural launch, later followed by the Ryzen 9000X3D series, which incorporates AMD's 3D V-Cache technology, significantly enhancing gaming performance. Consequently, AMD has two flagship products: the Ryzen 9 9950X3D from the 3D V-Cache branch and the Ryzen 9 9950X from the main family. In contrast, Intel only has the Core Ultra 200S (codenamed Arrow Lake) series to compete against AMD, with the Core Ultra 9 285K as the singular leader of Intel's army.

Features and Specifications: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D vs Intel Core Ultra 9 285K

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D features Zen 5 execution cores and adheres to a conventional 16-core, 32-thread configuration. On the contrary, the Core Ultra 9 285K employs a hybrid design, integrating P-cores (Lion Cove) and E-cores (Skymont). Consequently, the Core Ultra 9 285K showcases a 24-core, 24-thread design. With Arrow Lake, Intel went with an approach without Hyper-Threading, so the Core Ultra 9 285K has fewer threads than the Ryzen 9 9950X3D.

Concerning clock speeds, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D exhibits a 16% greater base clock speed than the Core Ultra 9 285K. However, both processors possess identical boost clocks. For cache capacity, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is equipped with AMD's 3D V-Cache, providing a total cache of 144MB (16MB L2 + 128MB L3). On the other hand, the Core Ultra 9 285K is accompanied by a cache capacity of 76MB (36MB L2 + 40MB L3). Consequently, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D has 3.2X more L3 cache, which is advantageous for gaming and specific workloads.

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D has a 36% greater TDP (Thermal Design Power) or, in Intel's case, PBP (Processor Base Power), than the Core Ultra 9 285K. Nevertheless, the latter features a 9% higher MTP (Maximum Turbo Power). Therefore, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D has superior power efficiency to the Core Ultra 9 285K.

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Core Ultra 9 285K support PCIe 5.0 connectivity and DDR5 memory. Both provide 24 high-speed PCIe 5.0 lanes to support the latest graphics cards and PCIe 5.0 SSDs. Regarding memory support, only the Core Ultra 9 285K has embraced CUDIMMs (Clocked Unbuffered Dual In-line Memory Modules), bumping the native supported frequency up to DDR5-6400. As far as conventional DIMMs are concerned, both support DDR5-5600.

Platform longevity favors the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, as the chip resides on the AM5 platform, which was launched in 2022 with AMD's commitment to providing support until 2027. On the other hand, the Core Ultra 9 285K uses the LGA1851 platform, which was released in 2024, but its life span is likely to be limited. There are indications that Intel may refresh Arrow Lake for LGA1851 before transitioning to the LGA1954 platform for forthcoming processors.

⭐ Winner: Tie

Specification-wise, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D has a big L3 cache thanks to AMD's 3D V-Cache technology and lower power consumption overall than the Core Ultra 9 285K. Another of AMD's strengths is the life expectancy of the AM5 platform, which is substantially higher than LGA1851. Investing in the platform now offers a ticket for future processor upgrades.

The LGA1851, in contrast, represents a fading platform. Arrow Lake may be the sole chip to utilize the LGA1851 platform, or possibly Arrow Lake Refresh, assuming the latest rumors are true. This is not particularly surprising, as the typical cadence for Intel sockets has consistently been two or three generations of chips, unlike AMD.

In LGA1851's defense, it is presently the sole platform that completely supports CUDIMMs. One advantage the Core Ultra 9 285K holds over the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is the possibility of leveraging CUDIMMs, such as high-speed memory DDR5-9200 and beyond. Nevertheless, considering the long life span of AM5, it is likely that full CUDIMM support will be introduced for AMD's platform in due course.

Gaming Benchmarks and Performance: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D vs Intel Core Ultra 9 285K

This article provides an overview of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Core Ultra 9 285K's performance metrics. We have also published in-depth individual reviews of these two CPUs, which you can refer to for more details. These graphs show the geometric mean of our gaming test results with these two CPUs at 1080p (1920x1080) resolution.

We paired both CPUs with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card to minimize potential bottlenecks. Testing at 1080p might seem irrelevant for such a powerful setup, but this resolution allows us to see the full potential of our CPUs in gaming.

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D outperformed the Core Ultra 9 285K in gaming performance. This outcome was anticipated, as gaming performance is the former's most notable strength, attributable to the substantial L3 cache enabled by AMD's 3D V-Cache technology.

Cumulatively, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D yielded average frame rates that were 34% higher than those of the Core Ultra 9 285K throughout our testing suite of 16 games, utilizing a combination of High and Ultra graphical settings at 1080p. Furthermore, the AMD flagship demonstrated a 27% higher result in 1% Lows.

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Core Ultra 9 285K hit the market at $699 and $620, respectively. The former presents 0.28 FPS per dollar, while the latter offers 0.23. Despite costing 13% more, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D has more gaming value for your money. While the Ryzen 9 9950X3D has maintained its pricing, the Core Ultra 9 285K has dropped to $589, reaching 0.25.

⭐ Winner: AMD

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D is undoubtedly the better choice for gaming enthusiasts. While the Core Ultra 9 285K is a capable gaming processor, it falls short compared to the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, which is almost 35% faster in average frame rates and close to 30% faster in 1% Lows.

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D has consistently maintained a higher price point than the Core Ultra 9 285K. Notwithstanding the recent price reductions of the Core Ultra 9 285K, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D continues to provide better value in gaming.

Productivity Performance: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D vs Intel Core Ultra 9 285K

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D flaunts superior multi-threaded performance, but the contest is heated. The Zen 5 processor delivers a mere 3% higher multi-threaded performance than the Core Ultra 9 285K.

Looking at benchmarks individually, there are times when the Core Ultra 9 285K is substantially faster. For example, the Intel chip boasted 18% higher results in POV-Ray or 11% higher in HandBrake x265. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D also has its moments, such as in V-Ray 6, where it outperformed the Core Ultra 9 285K by 17%.

Intel continues to be the leader in single-threaded performance; however, the disparity has been narrowing, as evidenced by the current generation. The Core Ultra 9 285K achieved a 9% better single-threaded overall than the Ryzen 9 9950X3D.

The POV-Ray benchmark clearly favors the Core Ultra 9 285K, which significantly surpassed the Ryzen 9 9950X3D by an impressive 31%. Conversely, the performance delta between the two processors wasn't as big in other workloads.

⭐ Winner: Tie

There is no definitive victor in this comparison. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D has higher multi-threaded performance relative to the Core Ultra 9 285K. Nevertheless, the disparity stands at merely 3%, a difference that may not be noteworthy across all workloads.

Meanwhile, the Core Ultra 9 285K is better at single-thread performance than the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, where the former exhibits a speed increase of 9% over the latter. It can be argued that a loss of 3% is more tolerable than a loss of 9%; this perspective holds validity when one prioritizes a chip for productivity purposes while overlooking gaming considerations.

Overclocking: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D vs Intel Core Ultra 9 285K

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Intel Core Ultra 9 285K have unlocked multipliers and are ready for your manual overclocking endeavors. The quality of overclocking can vary significantly between processors, and currently, we do not possess a substantial number of samples from which to derive definitive conclusions. Our results are primarily based on our overclocking experiences with the single sample available in our lab.

In the context of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, we activated AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) functionality. For the PBO configuration, we utilized the 'advanced' and 'motherboard' power settings, accompanied by a 10X scalar adjustment and an increase of 200 MHz in the clock speed. Furthermore, we implemented a -15 all-core Curve Optimizer offset.

We've also experimented with Intel's latest '200S Boost' feature combined with some manual overclocking. But the long story short is that there isn't much practical headroom for performance gains with fabric overclocking. Intel also offers manual tuning for the P-cores and E-cores, though the actual performance gains are heavily weighted towards the latter.

⭐ Winner: Tie

Unlike the old Pentium, modern processors arrive with little headroom for serious overclocking with conventional cooling. It's a two-way street. On a positive note, you can rest easy at night knowing their chips are at or near their potential. However, on the downside, the art of extracting additional performance at no cost is slowly fading away.

Power Consumption, Efficiency, and Cooling: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D vs Intel Core Ultra 9 285K

On the contrary, the Core Ultra 9 285K reveals a higher power consumption during various workload scenarios. The Intel chip operates within a power range of 219W to 325W, whereas its AMD counterpart operates between 178W and 228W. Notably, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D has a peak power consumption that is 30% lower than that of the Core Ultra 9 285K.

Most PCs rarely truly idle; users might leave various applications open on the desktop. There's also an 'active idle' use case wherein the user does a low-load activity, such as browsing the web or watching a YouTube video. To model this behavior, we created an active idle test (second slide) with two browser windows open (one with two tabs idling on a website and another window with a 4K YouTube video stream playing). We measure this level of activity across a 15-minute timespan.

The Core Ultra 9 285K has 30% lower idle power consumption than the Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Furthermore, the Core Ultra 9 285 K's active idle power consumption during YouTube playback is particularly notable, as it consumes 39% less power.

The Core Ultra 9 285K was more power efficient in the Linpack workload, displaying a 5% lower watt-hour. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D excelled in the Cinebench 2024 workload, landing a 10% higher watts per point and a 13% lower watts per FPS in the HandBrake x265 test.

The ideal balance is performance at a reduced power consumption. To elaborate, the processor at the bottom right corner of the power efficiency charts represents the best chip in terms of efficiency. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D outperforms the Core Ultra 9 285K in multiple benchmarks.

⭐ Winner: AMD

The Core Ultra 9 285K wins at idle power consumption, but the Ryzen 9 9950X3D consumes less power under load. While both idle and average power consumption should be considered, the latter is ultimately more important since we typically use our systems under heavier use or in 'active idle' conditions rather than letting them truly idle for prolonged periods.

Furthermore, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D has better power efficiency than the Core Ultra 9 285K. A power-efficient processor helps reduce system costs, including processor cooling and power supply capacity expenses. It also positively contributes to electricity savings.

Pricing: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D vs Intel Core Ultra 9 285K

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D launched last month at $699. Since this processor recently came out of the oven, it's unrealistic to expect any price adjustments. Meanwhile, the Core Ultra 9 285K debuted at $620 in October 2024. Nowadays, you can find the flagship Arrow Lake chip at U.S. retailers for $589, 5% below the launch price.

Intel processors usually maintain their value until the next generation arrives. Therefore, it's unlikely that the Core Ultra 9 285K will officially get any cheaper. You may still find a retailer deal here or there.

To put things in perspective, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D's gaming performance is 34% higher than the Core Ultra 9 285K while being 19% more expensive. The Zen 5 part has a 3% multi-threaded advantage over the Core Ultra 9 285K, but the Intel chip does have up to 9% higher single-threaded performance, though.

⭐ Winner: AMD

At $699, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D may look like a scary investment. However, our results show that even with that hefty price tag, the 3D V-Cache flagship gives you more value for your money in gaming. The multi-threaded performance isn't shabby, but it does lose out to the Core Ultra 9 285K in single-threaded performance.

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D already looks good. However, its appeal will grow further when the pricing starts to decline, whether through official price reductions or retailer promotions during special events such as Black Friday.

Bottom Line: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D vs Intel Core Ultra 9 285K

The gaming performance of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D was never in doubt, particularly given that lower-tier Zen 5 components equipped with 3D V-Cache have already surpassed the Core Ultra 9 285K by massive margins. However, the more important question is whether the Ryzen 9 9950X3D possesses any appeal outside the gaming realm. The answer to this inquiry is yes.

In addition to being a great gaming processor, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D can double as a productivity monster, similar to the vanilla Ryzen 9 9950X. Thanks to the Zen 5 architecture and the 16-core, 32-thread configuration, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D has no issues tackling demanding workloads, as long as they benefit from multi-threading. Unfortunately, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D's single-threaded performance lags behind the Core Ultra 9 285K.

However, if you can overlook the Ryzen 9 9950X3D's single-threaded weakness, the Zen 5 chip is a fantastic all-around performer that's power efficient and offers support for the latest technology. And unlike the Core Ultra 9 285K, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D doesn't leave you feeling like you just bought an obsolete processor—at least for a couple of years.

In a bid to improve Arrow Lake sales, Intel has significantly discounted its mainstream 20-core Core Ultra 7 265K, which is readily selling at or below $300 at various retailers, including Amazon. That's a massive 25% cut over its original $400 recommended customer price set by Intel at launch. While the slightly more affordable 14-core Core Ultra 5 245K is also selling below its MSRP at $269, the Core Ultra 7 265K is arguably the better buy.

This is likely part of a small promotional sale, which is why we're using the term discount instead of permanent price cuts. Even so, they don't appear to be regional, as reports from ComputerBase indicate similar pricing trends in Germany. Intel's candidate is a great choice for promoting Arrow Lake sales, since the Core Ultra 7 265K wields an impressive 20 (8P+12E) core / 20 thread configuration, rivaling the i7-14700K from the previous generation, while offering better efficiency.

The CPU carries 66MB of total cache (36MB L2 + 30MB L3). Sticking to JEDEC-compliant speeds, Arrow Lake at stock can handle 6400 MT/s DDR5 kits (CUDIMM), going as fast as 8000 MT/s with Intel's warrantied boost profiles. As of writing, the Core Ultra 7 265K (and its KF variant) can be purchased for $294 at Amazon. The model with the integrated GPU is a no-brainer, given that its built-in Xe-LPG (Alchemist) iGPU offers QuickSync functionality with AV1 encoding.

Die shots of Intel’s Arrow Lake architecture have been published, revealing Intel’s chiplet (tile) infused design in all of its glory. Andreas Schiling on X shared several images of Arrow Lake up close, revealing the layout of Arrow Lake’s individual tiles and the layout of the cores inside the compute tile.

The first photo exposes the full die of Intel’s desktop Core Ultra 200S series CPUs, with the compute tile on the upper left, the IO tile on the bottom, and the SoC tile and GPU tile on the right. To the bottom left and top right are two filler dies designed to provide structural rigidity.

The compute die is fabbed on TSMC’s bleeding-edge N3B node, with a total area of 117.241 mm². The IO tile and SoC tile are fabbed on TSMC’s older N6 node, with the IO tile measuring 24.475mm squared and the SoC tile 86.648mm squared. All of the tiles rest on an underlying base tile fabbed on Intel’s 22nm FinFET node. Arrow Lake is the first Intel architecture that is fabricated entirely using nodes from a competitor, except for the base tile.

The next image shows all of the sub-components for the secondary tiles in Arrow Lake. The I/O die houses the Thunderbolt 4 controller/display PHY, PCIe Express buffers/PHYs, and TBT4 PHYs. The SoC tile houses the display engines, media engine, more PCIe PHYs, buffers, and the DDR5 memory controllers. The GPU tile houses four Xe GPU cores and an Xe LPG (Arc Alchemist) render slice.

The final image shows off Intel’s latest core configuration for Arrow Lake, which differs from previous hybrid Intel architectures. For Arrow Lake, Intel opted to sandwich the E-cores between the P-cores rather than putting them all in their own cluster, allegedly to reduce thermal hotspots. Four of the eight P-cores reside on the borders of the die with the other four residing in the middle of the die. The four E-core clusters (which house four cores each) are sandwiched between the outer and inner P-cores.

Schilling’s die shot also exposes the cache layout for Arrow Lake, comprised of 3MB of L3 cache per P-core (36MB in total) and 3MB of L2 cache per E-core cluster, with 1.5MB shared between two cores directly. An interconnect bridges the two L2 cache clusters (and their associated cores) together, which is also responsible for connecting each core cluster to the ring agent. One major upgrade Intel made with Arrow Lake is connecting the E-core clusters to L3 cache shared by the P-cores, effectively giving the E-cores an L3 cache.

Arrow Lake is one of Intel’s most complex architectures to date and the first from the company to bring a chiplet-style design to the desktop market. That said, Intel’s first attempt at a desktop chiplet-based competitor has not been well received, due to latency issues from the interconnect, which is responsible for connecting all the tiles together. Intel is attempting to rectify the issue through firmware updates. Still, its current implementation can’t touch AMD’s competing Ryzen 9000 CPUs (such as the 9800X3D), nor is it enough to even beat its own previous-generation 14th-generation processors in gaming (such as the 14900K).

All that said, moving to a chiplet approach will afford Intel more ways to optimize its architectures down the road, in a more efficient manner. Each tile can be developed independently of others and built with different nodes to improve yields, optimize development, and reduce production costs.

Intel has recently introduced two performance-boosting features for its Core Ultra 200S (codenamed Arrow Lake) processors, which rank among the best CPUs. While IPO (Intel Performance Optimizations) and 200S Boost share the same objective, one BiliBili user's tests (via Uniko's Hardware) seemingly show that IPO delivers a higher gaming performance uplift.

The user performed the tests with a Core Ultra 7 265K, DDR5-8000 memory, and a GeForce RTX 5090D. They benchmarked IPO and 200S Boost across seven games with different quality settings at 2160p (3840 x 2160) and DLSS activated when applicable.

The Core Ultra 7 265K was a part of three configurations. The XMP configuration enables XMP to get the memory up to DDR5-8000 with no changes to the processor. The 200S Boost configuration increases the Die-to-Die (D2D) communication fabric from the default 2.1 GHz to 3.2 GHz and the Next Generation Uncore (NGU) fabric from 2.6 GHz to 3.2 GHz.

On the other hand, the IPO configuration makes several changes to the processor. For starters, it increases the P-core and E-core clocks to 5.4 GHz and 4.9 GHz, respectively, from the default 5.2 GHz and 4.9 GHz. While the 200S Boost doesn't touch the Ring (3.8 GHz), IPO overclocks it to 4 GHz. These adjustments limit IPO from pushing the D2D and NGU as hard as 200S Boost. As a result, the IPO only dials in at 3.1 GHz for the D2D and NGU. The memory, however, is tuned to DDR5-8400 with optimized timings.

Intel IPO vs. Intel 200S Boost Gaming Performance

Intel made a slew of announcements at its Intel Foundry Direct 2025 event in San Jose, California, and finally shared performance metrics for its upcoming 14A process node, slated for risk production in 2027, touting headline improvements of up to a 35% reduction in power consumption. Intel also teased its new Turbo Cell technology, a customizable design approach geared to provide maximum CPU frequency and to boost performance for critical speed paths in GPUs.

The 14A and 14A-E nodes are the next generation after the company's 18A node. Intel says 14A will deliver a 15 to 20% performance-per-watt increase over 18A, which can be leveraged as either higher clock speeds or 25-35% lower power consumption at the same performance, depending upon chip-specific tuning. Much of this improvement is due to Intel's new direct-contact backside power delivery network, which the company has dubbed PowerDirect (more here).

Intel has also sprinkled in other new features to improve the node, such as a wider threshold voltage (Vt) range that enables a more expansive voltage/frequency curve.

The 14A nodes also deliver a 1.3X increase in transistor density over the 18A node. Intel has also revamped its RibbonFET transistors for 14A, now known as 'RibbonFET 2.' Intel hasn't shared details about the new generation of RibbonFET, but the general design provides improved transistor density and faster transistor switching by utilizing four stacked nanosheets surrounded entirely by the gate (you can see the cross-section with nmos and pmos transistors above).

Turbo Cells and Critical Paths

Intel's new Turbo Cells are a standout feature, but they are a bit complicated. Turbo Cells can be used for a multitude of purposes, but Intel specifically calls out that they will be utilized in the critical paths of the CPU and GPU, often referred to as speed paths. And for good reason.

Timing paths within a processor are routes that a signal travels along, through wires and logic gates, during normal operation. However, delays to those signals can interrupt the clock timing of the processor. The critical paths are those that have the longest total delay.

Because processors operate based on clock signals, the slowest critical path dictates the highest possible frequency limit of the entire chip, serving as a bottleneck to overall performance (there are distinctions here for the various clock domains, but the general principle holds true). Chip designers often use higher-speed transistors in these areas of a chip, but this comes at the cost of reduced transistor density and increased power consumption, as faster transistors are leakier and thus consume more power. The new Turbo Cells provide chip architects with a more refined tool to mitigate critical paths.

The 14A node features three distinct standard cell libraries, which use process node-specific building blocks (standard cells constructed with transistors) of pre-designed logic gates and circuit elements. Designers use electronic design automation (EDA) software tools to utilize the libraries during the design flow and generally lay them out in rows.

Intel's 14A has three different libraries: the 'tall' library has transistor cells optimized for high frequency (low density, leaky), the 'mid-size' library is optimized for performance per watt, and the 'short' library is focused on density for area- and power-sensitive applications. Intel has not shared density information for the various libraries yet.

Short libraries are used heavily in CPUs and GPUs to pack in the most transistors possible while keeping power density at manageable levels. That's where Intel's new Turbo Cells step in.

Turbo Cells are designed to enhance performance by increasing the transistor drive current for short libraries when they're used to create double-height libraries (the height of two standard rows), all while maintaining a high-density arrangement for optimal area efficiency.

The above graphic represents four different arrangements of nmos and pmos ribbons/nanosheets (pink and green) with varying widths and configurations to optimize drive current for different scenarios. The width of the ribbons can be adjusted, or they can be merged independently to create very wide ribbons for maximum drive current delivery. The various options provide designers with a robust toolkit for tailored implementations.

Intel says Turbo Cells can ultimately be used to mix in faster and less power-efficient cells with the power-efficient cells within the same design block to create the right balance of power, performance, and area (PPA) for any given use case.

Critical paths are the ultimate bottleneck; think of them as the weakest link in the chain. Intel's new Turbo Cells are designed to boost overall processor performance by speeding up those paths, but without making the compromises often used to solve the critical path problem. We'll have to wait until 2027 to see how that pans out.

An update by Intel to the perfmon platform has added support for upcoming Panther Lake CPUs, listing their core architecture codenames and CPUID, via InstLatX64. This commit unofficially confirms that Panther Lake will employ Cougar Cove Performance (P) cores, while Darkmont will serve to power its Efficiency (E), and likely Low Power Efficiency (LPE) cores as well. Panther Lake is expected to launch later this year, succeeding current-generation Arrow Lake U/H offerings.

With Intel's flagship 18A in risk production, Panther Lake is scheduled for mass production later this year. Hence, it wouldn't be surprising if the bulk of Panther Lake arrives in Q1 next year, similar to how Meteor Lake rolled out. Make no mistake: Panther Lake isn't a successor to Lunar Lake, which was uniquely focused on efficiency as a one-off product, with on-package memory, limited TDP, and a power-optimized design. Current rumors indicate Panther Lake variants will sport up to 18 hybrid cores (6P+8E+4LPE) and 12 Xe cores, based on Intel's upcoming Celestial (Xe3) graphics architecture.

Intel positions Panther Lake as combining Arrow Lake's power and Lunar Lake's efficiency, but that's still a somewhat general claim. According to leaks, most Panther Lake systems will include traditional SODIMM/soldered memory, while some laptop designs might even support next-gen LPCAMM, combining fast and upgradeable RAM. Based on their TDP (rumored: up to 64W), Panther Lake chips are expected to power a wide range of devices, including entry-level laptops, handhelds, and gaming laptops. The company is even eying bringing this architecture to automobiles.

An Intel engineer has pushed an update to the lookup table for perfmon, adding Panther Lake as a supported architecture. Panther Lake has been marked with the "GenuineIntel-6-CC" identifier, assigning it to CPU Family 6, Model 204 (0xCC). In addition, the patch reports the Cougar Cove and Darkmont architectures for Panther Lake's Performance (P) and Efficiency (E) cores, respectively.

It can be a challenge sometimes, upgrading to a new CPU if you don't know what to look for. It helps to be familiar with specs, but if you're not sure where to start, you can't go wrong with understanding the core/thread count and speed. In the case of today's deal, the Intel Core Ultra 5 Processor 245K offers specs at more of an upper mid-range with a good deal of compatibility with modern technologies (like PCIe 5.0 support). It usually goes for around $319 but right now it's been discounted to just $269 which is its lowest price to date.

This processor's physical core count is 14 with six of them being performance cores and eight of them efficiency cores. Under optimal conditions, the Intel Core Ultra 5 Processor 245K can reach speeds as high as 5.2 GHz. This might not be the fastest on the market, but is plenty of power to handle most modern computing needs. That said, we always recommend checking out our detailed CPU hierarchy list to see what's leading the market and how the processors compare.

As revealed by Phoronix, Intel's new '200S Boost' feature for its Arrow Lake chips results in little to no performance improvements on Linux. This parallels our 200S Boost testing in Windows, where memory overclocking from DDR5-6400 to DDR5-8000 accounted for most of the performance increases across gaming and productivity.

In the six months following Arrow Lake's debut, Intel has issued several fixes to extract every last bit of performance from these chips. The first wave was delivered via Windows Updates and updated BIOS versions in December, addressing several major issues. Following that, board partners released the long-awaited 0x114 microcode in January through BIOS updates carrying the ME19.0.0.1854v2.2 firmware.

Earlier this month, Intel debuted its IPO program in China, allowing System Integrators to offer enhanced power ratings and clock speeds under warranty. Similar to IPO, Intel's '200S Boost' profiles are opt-in BIOS presets available globally, enabling higher fabric, die-to-die, and memory-transfer speeds than stock.

Phoronix's test suite features the Core Ultra 9 285K, the Asus ROG Maximus Z890 Hero (1801 BIOS), the RX 7900 XTX, and 32GB of DDR5-6400 memory. The tests were conducted in Ubuntu 25.04 with the Linux kernel version 6.14. Gaming remained largely similar to stock, with small improvements in Counter-Strike 2 and Batman: Arkham Knight, while Dirt Rally 2.0 saw a significant drop in FPS (456 FPS vs 406 FPS) when switching to the boost profile.

The Ryzen 5 7533HS is a new Rembrandt-R-based APU that AMD quietly introduced to the market last year and is just now appearing in budget laptops via realVictor_M at X. To clarify, this isn't exactly a brand-new chip; it is simply a rebadged Ryzen 5 7535HS, with lower boost clocks and presumably a more attractive price tag for partner(s).

The Ryzen 5 7533HS breaks away from AMD's original naming convention for the Ryzen 7000/8000 series, where the last digit was used to indicate versions within an architecture ('0' for the lower model and '5' for the upper model), like Zen 3 (7530) versus Zen 3+ (7535). This isn't entirely surprising as AMD has a history of abandoning naming schemes, evident with their latest shift to "Ryzen AI". The Ryzen 5 7533HS is tagged under the Rembrandt-R family, with Zen 3+ cores and an RDNA 2-based iGPU.

In terms of specifications, the Ryzen 5 7533HS is nothing special. It wields a six-core / twelve-thread layout, along with 3MB of L2 and 16MB of L3 cache. The included Radeon 660M iGPU offers six RDNA2-based Compute Units. There's a 150 MHz drop in boost clocks compared to the Ryzen 5 7535HS. As the 'HS' modifier indicates, the APU has a configurable TDP between 35W and 54W, with support for DDR5-4800 (SODIMM) and LPDDR5-6400 (Soldered RAM) memory types.

Intel on Thursday posted its financial results for the first quarter of 2025. The company's earnings were flat year-over-year; however, its losses deepened, and its gross margin declined despite lower operating expenses. While sales of the company's data center grade products demonstrated signs of growth, sales of client CPUs declined compared to the same quarter a year ago. Perhaps more importantly, Intel gave a bleak outlook for the second quarter due to macro challenges. 

In the first quarter of 2025, Intel reported flat year-over-year revenue of $12.7 billion, with a net loss of $821 million, nearly twice the amount compared to the same quarter a year ago. The company's gross margin declined to 36.9%, pressured by a product mix, startup costs for the 18A ramp-up, and uncertainties (which Intel referred to as macroeconomic headwinds).

The company's operating expenses — including research and development (R&D) as well as management, general, and administrative costs (MG&A) — declined to $4.8 billion in Q1 2025 from $5.9 billion in Q1 2024. However, despite this decline, the company's losses increased. 

"The first quarter was a step in the right direction, but there are no quick fixes as we work to get back on a path to gaining market share and driving sustainable growth," said Lip-Bu Tan, Intel CEO. "I am taking swift actions to drive better execution and operational efficiency while empowering our engineers to create great products. We are going back to basics by listening to our customers and making the changes needed to build the new Intel." 

Perhaps the most alarming sign is that Intel's Client Computing Group (CCG) revenues fell 8% year-over-year to $7.6 billion. This drop was attributed to weaker-than-expected PC demand, particularly in the consumer segment, competitive pricing, and unfavorable product mix that includes a plethora of products made by TSMC. Interestingly, many of Intel's customers favored older-generation products like Raptor Lake over newer, higher-cost platforms such as Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, and Lunar Lake. 

Despite these challenges, Intel noted demand for AI PCs from business customers, as well as enterprise fleet upgrades and Windows 10 end-of-service migrations, although this was insufficient to offset the broader softness in consumer sales. 

Intel's Data Center and AI (DCAI) business unit reported $4.1 billion in revenue in Q1 2025, achieving an 8% year-over-year increase, making it one of the few growth areas for the company. The performance was primarily driven by strong demand from hyperscalers for host CPUs in AI server deployments. However, the segment faced margin pressure due to competitive dynamics from AMD, product mix, and elevated demand for older-generation parts rather than newer offerings. 

Despite the revenue growth, Intel acknowledged macroeconomic uncertainty, potential spending pullbacks, and competition from AMD and Arm-based server solutions as risks that could affect DCAI performance in the coming quarters. The company remains focused on stabilizing market segment share and increasing average selling prices (ASPs) while preparing for the ramp of its next-generation server products. 

Intel Foundry reported $4.7 billion in revenue, reflecting a 7% year-over-year increase driven mostly by internal demand, particularly from Intel's own product groups for wafers and advanced packaging services. Despite revenue growth, the Foundry segment continued to operate at a significant loss, posting an operating loss of $2.3 billion, which remained roughly flat compared to the previous quarter. 

Intel's Lip-Bu Tan reiterated at the conference call that the company's Foundry success hinges not just on manufacturing capabilities but also on building customer trust, improving process design enablement, and supporting a broader range of customer flows. For now, the key mission of Intel Foundry is to ramp up production of Intel 18A-based Panther Lake and then Clearwater Forest processors in late 2025 – 2026 to prove that IF has a node that is competitive with TSMC's N2. 

Times are already tough for Intel, but now it turns out its new, heavily-promoted AI PC chips aren't selling as well as expected, thus creating a shortage of production capacity for its older chips. The news comes as the CEO announced looming layoffs and a poor financial report sent the company's stock tumbling.

Intel says its customers are buying less expensive previous-generation Raptor Lake chips instead of the new, and significantly more expensive, AI PC models like the Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake chips for laptops.

During the earnings call, Intel announced that it currently faces a shortage of production capacity for its 'Intel 7' process node, and the company expects this shortage to "persist for the foreseeable future." That's an unexpected shortage to have, as Intel's current-gen chips use newer process nodes from TSMC instead of Intel's older 'Intel 7' node. Intel is a master at production capacity planning, so its disclosure points to an unexpected surge in sales of the older 'Intel 7' products.

Intel explained that the shortage of its 7nm production capacity is due to an unexpected surge in demand for its "N-1 and N-2" products, a reference to its two prior-generation chip families. This trend is occurring in both the consumer and data center markets.

"What we're really seeing is much greater demand from our customers for n-1 and n-2 products so that they can continue to deliver system price points that consumers are really demanding," explained Intel's Michelle Johnston Holthaus. "As we've all talked about, the macroeconomic concerns and tariffs have everybody kind of hedging their bets and what they need to have from an inventory perspective. And Raptor Lake is a great part. Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake are great as well, but come with a much higher cost structure, not only for us, but at the system ASP price points for our OEMs as well."

Bernstein Research's Stacy Rasgon pressed Holtahaus about the implications for the company's upcoming Panther Lake chips, which are set to launch at the end of the year, especially given that the looming tariff disruptions have not yet occurred.

Holthaus said the Panther Lake launch remains on track and the company expects continued success in the commercial market, which she said typically precedes broader consumer adoption. Notably, she did not directly address the company's expected next-gen AI PC adoption for consumer laptops. Regardless, the company also continues its expansive work to promote and cultivate a growing developer ecosystem to unleash the power of its AI wares.

However, the fact is that AI still doesn't seem to have the 'killer app' that would send waves of customers to stores to purchase an expensive new laptop. Instead, most of the new features revolve around built-in features in existing applications, such as chat and productivity software, that are more nuanced and not quite flashy enough to spark a wave of adoption.

Expanding its wings into the automotive ecosystem, Intel shared its upcoming SDV (Software-Defined Vehicle) SoC designs at Auto Shanghai 2025 yesterday. Slated to be the industry's first disaggregated design, the company presented its second-generation SDV SoC, internally codenamed Frisco Lake. A detailed investigation by 3elife, a Chinese tech and news publication, purports these SoCs are derivatives of Intel's Panther Lake design, with their successor allegedly based on Nova Lake.

Software-defined vehicles are automobiles where a majority of the functionality is handled through software, rather than traditional physical, mechanical, or electronic components. Compared to desktops, x86 has seen limited adoption in the automotive industry, primarily due to stringent power consumption requirements, real-time processing demands, and safety and security concerns.

However, as ADAS, autonomous driving, in-car experiences, and the need for high-performance computing in vehicles grow, Intel is positioning itself to gain traction in this market. Last year, the company released the 225W Arc A760A, offering a PC-like experience from the comfort of your car. The Raptor-Lake-based Malibou Lake platform represents Intel's latest SDV offering, featuring up to 14 cores (6P+8E), 24MB L3 cache, 96 EUs, and support for eight cameras, slated for a Q4 2024 launch.

Yesterday, Intel shared several slides detailing Frisco Lake, officially poised to deliver 10 times better AI performance and 61% higher efficiency than current offerings, presumably Malibou Lake. In addition, the inclusion of an Xe3 (Celestial) graphics IP block strongly suggests these SoCs are indeed derived from Panther Lake, a connection that is supported by the source and kernel patches (via Harukaze at X). The use of Intel's flagship 18A process node and the jump from Raptor Cove to Cougar Cove (rumored) would explain the sharp spike in efficiency.

That's not all, as 3elife secured an alleged roadmap detailing Intel's future product offerings from a third party. Assuming this timeline is accurate, Frisco Lake was never actually intended for launch and appears to be a last-minute addition to Intel's product stack. Apparently, Malibou Lake was in line to be superseded by Grizzly Lake, which is now expected to serve as Intel's third-generation SDV SoC design.

Under the Grizzly Lake lineup, the leaked slides mention an SoC codenamed Monument Peak, reportedly offering up to 32 cores, a 7 TFLOPS-capable Xe-based integrated GPU, slated for the first half of 2027. This time frame coincides with Nova Lake, and one rumored configuration of that architecture includes 32 efficient cores (16P+32E+4LPE), likely based on the Arctic Wolf microarchitecture.

So, if these rumors hold true, Intel is porting its consumer-grade architectures to the automotive industry with a one-year cadence. Considering the extensive validation processes and typically long lifecycles of these chips, automobiles usually don't opt for the most cutting-edge core design, unlike the desktop market. It's hard to say what the future holds, but perhaps Intel's limited success in the mobile phone and AI markets might be a catalyst for this drive to establish a strong foothold in the automotive domain.

Intel has reportedly placed orders with TSMC for its bleeding-edge 2nm-class N2 process technology, according to Economic Daily News. This news comes shortly after AMD officially confirmed its Zen 6 'Venice' server chips, likely the CCDs, will be fabricated using the same node. If the report is accurate, these wafers are likely intended for Intel's Nova Lake lineup of CPUs. While this might put into question 18A's capabilities, Intel officially declared a dual-sourcing strategy for Nova Lake as early as last November.

Nova Lake serves as the successor to Arrow Lake, and is rumored to feature up to 52 hybrid cores (16P+32E+4LPE) segmented into two blocks of eight Coyote Cove P-cores, 16 Arctic Wolf E-cores, with four LPE cores likely in a separate SoC Tile. Rumor has it that Nova Lake will transition to a new LGA1954 socket, meaning existing 800-series motherboards won't be compatible.

We are seeing several architectural jumps here as the expected progression is Lion Cove (ARL/LNL), then Cougar Cove, and Coyote Cove for Performance (P) cores. Similarly, Arctic Wolf is suggested to follow Darkmont, which comes after Skymont (ARL/LNL) for Efficiency (E) cores. With 18A already in risk production, the shift to TSMC is probably driven by capacity needs, rather than performance or yield concerns.

Intel 18A should power some of Intel's most ambitious products in recent history: Clearwater Forest and Diamond Rapids (rumored), the former of which has been delayed to H1 2026 citing packaging concerns. To ease pressure on its 18A production line and prevent delays with consumer products, Intel, under interim CEO Michelle Holthaus, announced outsourcing some Nova Lake dies to partners like TSMC and Samsung.

As insinuated by leaker Kepler on X, high-end Nova Lake products will, allegedly, be built using N2 while 18A will be designated for the lower-end parts. This isn't Intel's first time partnering up with TSMC for CPU production, as the company's latest Arrow Lake CPUs (using N3B, N5P, and N6), Lunar Lake (using N3B and N6), and for GPUs Alchemist (using N6), and Battlemage(using N4) have all leveraged TSMC's process technology. This increases Intel's spending, requiring a careful balance between expediting product launches via external foundries or facing delays with its internal manufacturing.

To some extent, even Arrow Lake is dual-sourced with Arrow Lake-U (for low-power devices) using the Intel 3 process. While Arrow Lake had minimal in-house production, ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger reported that Intel will produce most of Nova Lake internally. Relying on TSMC isn't inherently bad if 18A can land a handful of external customers. Analysts have also suggested Nvidia might be eyeing Intel's nodes for its consumer GPUs in the future. Either way, Nova Lake is slated to be a 2026 product, so we're likely looking at the second half with how Intel launches usually proceed.

According to documents shared with Tom's Hardware by a source, Intel will announce a new "Intel 200S Boost" feature for its Arrow Lake processors tomorrow that's designed to boost gaming performance by providing official warranty coverage for a subset of overclocking features, including memory overclocking. As you can see below, we have put the new feature through a battery of tests before its official launch and found the gains generally match our expectations for memory overclocking, with an average improvement of 7.5% over the officially supported memory speeds.

It's no secret that Intel's Arrow Lake chips delivered disappointing gaming performance at launch — in fact, they are significantly slower than even Intel's own previous-gen models. The company has since corrected multiple launch-day issues, but that has not improved overall performance. The new approach aims to leverage several existing features and package them under the warranty protection umbrella, much like AMD introduced a 105W mode to boost performance for its underperforming 65W Ryzen 9000 models. However, Intel hasn't issued any official performance projections for the new feature yet.

The Intel 200S Boost feature enhances the performance of Arrow Lake K-series processors by enabling a few overclocking features in an easy-to-use one-click BIOS profile, but the new settings don't impact CPU clock speeds or power settings above current warranty limitations. Instead, the tweaks optimize specific memory and fabric speeds, marking the first time Intel has offered official warranty coverage for potential chip damage resulting from XMP memory overclocking profiles or adjusting fabric speeds.

There are, however, several caveats, and the tweaks are already well known to the enthusiast and overclocking community. Firstly, Intel now covers "up to" DDR5-8000 memory speeds within its warranty; however, not all chips will be able to reach that speed, and because the approach is still considered overclocking, Intel does not guarantee system stability with XMP profiles. As we demonstrate below, more affordable and easily supported DDR5-7200 kits offer nearly the same performance in most games and applications we tested.

The 200S Boost feature will be integrated into BIOS revisions from major motherboard vendors, with BIOS updates expected to arrive tomorrow from at least a few OEMs. The feature will only be implemented on Z-Series motherboards, which is a curious limitation given that Intel now supports memory overclocking on B-Series boards. It's also only available on K- and KF-series SKUs.

The 200S Boost profile also increases the speed of the Next Generation Uncore (NGU/SA Fabric), which enables communication between various chip elements, such as the CPU cores, memory controllers, and other components. This interface is upgraded from its standard 2.6 GHz speed to 3.2 GHz. Additionally, the Die-to-Die (D2D) communication fabric, which serves as a bridge between the Compute and SOC tiles or dies present inside the Arrow Lake chip, is increased from its stock 2.1 GHz to 3.2 GHz.

Intel is also obviously wary of motherboard vendors pushing the limits with their BIOS settings (which they have been known to do) and thus creating another potential chip reliability issue. As such, the company has also instituted several guardrails around the feature, with strict limitations that prevent motherboard makers from altering any other features, such as CPU clock speeds or power thresholds, as part of the 200S Boost settings. Intel also has voltage ceilings for the System Agent and memory that cannot be exceeded. You cannot use XMP kits that exceed the DIMM voltage ratings. The limits are listed in the table above.

The OEMs are allowed to tailor their voltage and speed settings within those constraints to optimize performance with their product. Any manual manipulation by the end user of clocks or other settings will automatically disable the 200S Boost profile, reverting you to manual overclocking. This feature also locks the overclocking mailbox to prevent OS-based overclocking. Finally, 200S Boost is entirely opt-in; it can't be enabled by default in the BIOS and requires users to turn it on.

Intel 200S Boost is separate from the Intel Performance Optimization (IPO) program, a China-specific collaboration between Intel and System Integrators (SIs) that facilitates more robust overclocking, including clock speeds and power settings. However, the SIs carry the warranty for that program, and Intel has no current plans to bring the IPO program to other regions.

Now on to the benchmarks.

Intel 200S Boost Gaming Performance

The 200S Boost feature is built on firmware with an MR1 or newer revision. We tested with the Core Ultra 9 285K on the MSI MEG Z890 ACE motherboard with a .1A53 BIOS revision that supports adding the feature, although it is not explicitly enabled yet. We merely recreated the correct settings for the feature in this BIOS, and sources close to the matter have confirmed that our results align with general expectations.

We tested six configurations and three memory speeds across 16 games at 1080p. The tested memory speeds include the stock DDR5-6400 with JEDEC timings, which was the previous limit for Intel's warranty, as well as the cost- and compatibility-friendly DDR5-7200 speed we use for our CPU reviews (32GB G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB DDR5-7200 kit for both). We also tested with a 32GB Patriot Extreme 5 DDR5-8000 kit to measure the peak supported XMP speeds.

The first slide displays the geometric mean of our gaming tests, which we conducted using an RTX 5090 Founders Edition. We tested the different memory speeds with the fabrics at stock settings and the listed memory speed (marked as stock in the chart), and then retested after increasing the fabric speeds to the higher 3.2 GHz threshold (marked as '200S Boost').

The largest increase in performance undoubtedly comes from memory overclocking. Moving from the stock DDR5-6400 configuration to the peak DDR5-8000 with fabric overclocking (200S Boost) yielded a 7.5% performance increase in our overall measurement. Naturally, performance increases vary by title, from as low as a 3.7% increase in A Plague Tale: Requiem to an 11.6% increase in Baldur's Gate 3. The per-game results generally hover in the 7% to 9% range. The titles that benefit most are simply the memory-sensitive titles, so there are no surprises here.

We, like many other outlets, test with a DDR5-7200 XMP profile as our default memory configuration. We chose this speed because it is widely supported by most chips (you may encounter issues with DDR5-8000 UDIMMs on some chips or motherboards) and it is more affordable — 32GB DDR5-8000 kits typically carry a $45 to $60 (43 to 57%) premium, yet deliver precious little extra performance.

We see that trend hold strong in our results, with the DDR5-8000 200S Boost configuration only being a mostly imperceptible 1.2% faster performance overall in 1080p gaming. Our advice for most enthusiasts remains the same — DDR5-7200 is the sweet spot for price and performance.

We have experimented with overclocking the fabric speeds in the past, but we found the increased performance to be largely unremarkable unless you are engaging in heavy overclocking of the CPU cores, which is not allowed in tandem with the 200S Boost feature.

To determine the impact of fabric speeds on the overall performance improvement, we toggled the fabrics between 200S Boost and Stock fabric settings for each memory speed. As you can see, it did give at least some boost in performance, but the gains undoubtedly fall into the imperceptible range. For instance, we measured a sub-1% increase in performance when using higher fabric clocks with the DDR5-6400 and DDR5-7200 configurations, and a 1.4% increase with the DDR5-8000 configuration.

It's possible that you could eke out higher gains from the fabric tweaks with lesser chips, like the Core Ultra 7 265K and the Core Ultra 5 245K, but you should keep your expectations in check.

We'll see how the fully-boosted Intel chips stack up against the competition further below.

In the interest of due diligence, we ran the chips through several productivity application benchmarks to assess the impact, but the results were entirely predictable — applications that benefit from memory overclocking saw small gains, while others saw none at all. In fact, the variations mostly fall within our expected run-to-run variance, so you shouldn't expect significant uplift in productivity applications.

The competitive landscape is basically unchanged

Here we've added the primary competitors for the Core Ultra 9 285K to the test results, and as you can see, the landscape remains largely unchanged from our most recent testing. Notably, we don't see as significant a gain because we test all processors with reasonable XMP settings applied as our stock configuration in reviews.

The fact that Arrow Lake couldn't match the gaming performance of Intel's own prior-gen Raptor Lake Refresh chips was one of the most disappointing aspects for enthusiasts. That still remains the case; the Core i9-14900K is now 6.5% faster than the 285K, whereas it was 9% faster in our prior testing (with both at DDR5-7200). That change isn't enough to drastically change the value equation between the Intel chips.

The situation also remains rough in comparison to AMD's competing models — the 285K is now about 3% slower than the Ryzen 9 9950X, roughly halving the distance between the two and bringing it closer to a draw, but the gaming-optimized X3D chips continue to dominate by almost absurd amounts. Here, the much less expensive Ryzen 7 9800X3D and its premium counterpart, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, still hold a 30%+ lead in gaming, so it remains a no-contest if you're strictly focused on gaming performance.

Despite the addition of new fabric tweaks and support for up to DDR5-8000, we still recommend that most users stick with DDR5-7200 — stepping up to DDR5-8000 incurs a significant cost for only about 1% more performance.

Overall, the new 200S Boost feature doesn't alter the competitive landscape, but it does provide an easy-to-use option for less-advanced users to gain a few extra percentage points of performance. The addition of warranty coverage for damage associated with the limited XMP memory or fabric overclocking is nice, but moderate memory overclocking is typically fairly safe in either case.

Intel is expected to officially announce the 200S Boost feature tomorrow, we'll follow up with further details as warranted.

Shipping documents sourced from NBD.ltd purport that Intel might switch to the LGA1954 platform for its next-generation Nova Lake processors on desktop (via Olrak). This is accompanied by PCH tooling likely intended for the 900-series chipsets. Importantly, these listings do not indicate an imminent launch, especially since Nova Lake has officially been confirmed as a 2026 product.

Nova Lake is officially a part of Intel's product family, set to supersede Arrow Lake next year. Preliminary silicon configurations allege two clusters of eight Coyote Cove P-cores and 16 Arctic Wolf E-cores, complemented by four Low-Power Efficient (LPE) cores in the SoC Tile, adding up to 52 hybrid cores. Intel's engineers explore numerous design strategies, so whether this ambitious 52-core project will ever see the light of day is unclear.

The information within the manifests implies that Intel is actively distributing LGA1954 testing hardware to its global facilities. Specifically, these are not full-fledged motherboards but appear to be some form of a specialized interposer to test voltage regulation for the upcoming platform. Either way, these kits are designated for "NVL-S", the shorthand for Nova Lake Desktop.