Intel's budget Core Ultra 5 230F, depicted by the black packaging and exclusive to the Chinese market, has been tested in detail by Expreview. Within the limited 65W envelope, it lands impressive wins against its predecessor, occasionally toppling the Core i5-14600K in productivity. However, it still suffers from issues plaguing Intel's high-end Arrow Lake offerings, with introductory prices extremely close to those of the unlocked K-series.
The Core Ultra 5 230F offers 10 cores (6P + 4E) and 10 cores based on the Arrow Lake architecture with Lion Cove performance and Skymont efficient cores. The max turbo frequency on the P-cores sees a nice 100 MHz bump versus the Core i5-14490F at 5 GHz, while the efficient cores can boost 700 MHz higher than last-gen. The Core Ultra 5 230F seemingly uses A0 silicon (the 6P + 8E die), which is different from other budget models based on the B0 stepping (the 8P + 16E die).
Nonetheless, Intel has packaged this CPU with 22MB of L2 cache and 24MB of L3 cache (46MB total), a 37% improvement over the 14490F with 33.5MB total cache. The reviewer says that the Core Ultra 5 230F is retailing in China for around 2,000 Yuan ($275), just $25 shy of the 245K and much more expensive than the i5-14600K, which readily goes for 1,499 Yuan ($200). This combination of a price increase, so-so performance gains, and high platform entry costs will likely deter many potential customers.
The test bench features the MSI MAG B860M Mortar WiFi for the LGA 1851 platform and the Asus ROG Strix B760-G Gaming WiFi for the LGA1700 platform. Both systems use the RTX 4090 Founders Edition and 32GB of DDR5-6000 CL36 memory from Corsair. The benchmarks contain two Core Ultra 5 230F test runs and Core i5-14490F, one at stock settings and the other with elevated power limits.
In benchmarks like Y-Cruncher, 7-Zip, and 3DMark, encoding, Blender, V-Ray, and Cinebench, the Core Ultra 5 230F easily leads its predecessor by 7.9% in single-threaded performance and 20.9% in multi-threaded workloads, at stock. Interestingly, with unlocked power limits, the Core Ultra 5 230F improves by just 3.2% versus default settings, which isn't that impressive. When stressed in AIDA64, the Core Ultra 5 230F (4.3 GHz) draws 73.6W at stock, while Core i5-14490F (3.4 GHz) sips 81.2W of power. Increasing the power budget means the 230F (4.8 GHz) consumes 108.5W, and the 14490F (4.4 GHz) uses 139.4W of power.
In games, the Core Ultra 5 230F is neck and neck against the unlocked Core Ultra 5 245K. This isn't as impressive as you'd think since the bar is set relatively low, occasionally losing to the Core i5-14490F. AMD's Ryzen 7000 non-X processors can be tuned to match their X-equivalents through PBO. The same cannot be said for budget Arrow Lake, which might be a dealbreaker for many, especially considering that LGA1851 is rumored to support only one CPU generation.
