Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus review: The new best $200 CPU

Intel’s Core Ultra 5 250K Plus matches the competition in gaming and absolutely runs circles around other chips in applications.

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Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus
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Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

If Intel ran back the Arrow Lake playbook, launching the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus at $300, it wouldn’t be impressive. There are some clear upsides in heavily-threaded applications, but at $300, the competition is fierce. At $200, the competition is lacking. We’ve seen the same six-core offering from AMD generation after generation, and Intel has barely managed to move the needle in this price bracket since the Core i5-12400.

The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus doesn’t just move the needle; it shatters the gauge. The Ryzen 5 7600X3D offers better gaming performance if you have a Micro Center close by, but otherwise, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus offers comparable gaming performance to the Ryzen 5 9600X and absolutely runs away with application performance. It’s often competing against processors that cost twice as much, especially in heavily-threaded workloads.

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Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

And, unlike the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, it’s not giving up a ton of efficiency to reach those marks. It consumes more power than the 245K, and Intel is still less efficient than AMD overall. Those increased power demands almost directly translate into higher performance, though. Further, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus managed to stay well below the other chips in our test pool in its thermal demands.

The only thing holding the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus back is the platform it’s on. The LGA 1851 socket will go away when Nova Lake CPUs launch later this year, so upgrading now locks you out of a further CPU swap down the line. AMD has built a moat for itself through platform longevity, and that’s only becoming more important as RAM and SSD prices continue to spin in the outer orbits of affordability.

That’s a downside for Intel, but it’s still largely offset by the performance. Unless you’re purely focused on gaming, you’re giving up an awful lot of performance by going with a Ryzen 5 9600X. And compared to Intel’s older Raptor Lake offerings, you’re also buying into a dead-end platform, giving up performance, and likely paying a higher price. In the market today, and with such an aggressive price, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is too powerful to ignore.

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Jake Roach
Jake Roach
Senior Analyst, CPUs

Jake Roach is the Senior CPU Analyst at Tom’s Hardware, writing reviews, news, and features about the latest consumer and workstation processors.

12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Notton
    I really like the cost performance on the i5 250K. It should kick AMD right in the nose.

    Now if only 32GB of RAM didn't cost $600...
    Reply
  • dmitche31958
    Notton said:
    I really like the cost performance on the i5 250K. It should kick AMD right in the nose.

    Now if only 32GB of RAM didn't cost $600...
    I agree. I'm not a dead in my seat gamer and productivity is far more important than squeezing a few FPS which most people can not notice, same as 4K TVs.

    Most people don't care about the soon to be outdated forms as like me we don't update with every new iteration. I'll update every 5-8 years and only when I see a need to and not when I want to feel the need to have the coolest and newest shiny object on the street.
    Reply
  • Gururu
    Fair analysis captures sentiment of the
    dmitche31958 said:
    I agree. I'm not a dead in my seat gamer and productivity is far more important than squeezing a few FPS which most people can not notice, same as 4K TVs.

    Most people don't care about the soon to be outdated forms as like me we don't update with every new iteration. I'll update every 5-8 years and only when I see a need to and not when I want to feel the need to have the coolest and newest shiny object on the street.
    99% of consumer base, including corporate, only cares that the platform is supported. The amount of users that upgrade a CPU is about as much as the dGPU market share held by Intel.
    Reply
  • usertests
    Good overall. I'd like to see it in some cheap OEM PCs, but I'll be keeping an eye on Nova Lake-S's iGPU.

    There is a 250KF that removes the iGPU for a $15 discount.

    Could the crazy idle power consumption that edges out the 270K here be explained by the higher base clocks? That and the D2D clock, of course.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    usertests said:
    Could the crazy idle power consumption that edges out the 270K here be explained by the higher base clocks?
    No it's definitely not as they all drop much lower than that on idle (base clocks are simply minimum clock speed under load). There's something else happening here as going through other reviews I'm not seeing significantly higher power numbers on 250K/270K parts. 200S Boost and using high speed memory can certainly play a part, but it would be reflected in the ARL-S parts too. While I doubt it perhaps even something with the updated APO/iBOT if it's running.
    usertests said:
    I'll be keeping an eye on Nova Lake-S's iGPU.
    The GPU portion will be no faster, and might even be slower, than ARL-S given it'll be 2 Xe3 cores versus 4 Xe cores.
    Reply
  • patriotpa
    NICE CPU. A word of warning though.....
    Geekbench6 site is flagging ALL 250K 270K and 290K benchmarks invalid with the following:

    "This benchmark result may be invalid due to binary modification tools that can run on this system."
    I wonder what skin they have in the game or who's paying them.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    patriotpa said:
    "This benchmark result may be invalid due to binary modification tools that can run on this system."
    I wonder what skin they have in the game or who's paying them.
    This is about iBOT. I'm guessing they're considering it to be "cheating" and cannot detect whether or not it's running. Of course given what a joke of a benchmark geekbench is that's pretty rich.
    Reply
  • dalauder
    This name sounds a lot like the legendary processor, the i5-2500K. That's probably the oldest midrange processor that would still make a computer feel normal in ordinary daily tasks.
    Reply
  • VizzieTheViz
    If you’re like nearly everyone and haven’t ever upgraded a cpu in a pc and don’t have any intention to then this is a really good cpu at this price.

    I was kind of miffed in the past at Intel for having no upgrade for my 6700K ever, but honestly it did pretty well until I replaced it with a 9800X3D last year (when prices were still somewhat sane on al parts) and it’s still doing well running emulators and streaming video for the kids.

    You can get a lot of value out of a pc with this cpu even if it is on a dead end platform (which all Intel platforms mostly were, usually there were only two generations on an a socket with Intel as i remember it).
    Reply
  • _EBN_
    VizzieTheViz said:
    If you’re like nearly everyone and haven’t ever upgraded a cpu in a pc and don’t have any intention to then this is a really good cpu at this price.

    I was kind of miffed in the past at Intel for having no upgrade for my 6700K ever, but honestly it did pretty well until I replaced it with a 9800X3D last year (when prices were still somewhat sane on al parts) and it’s still doing well running emulators and streaming video for the kids.

    You can get a lot of value out of a pc with this cpu even if it is on a dead end platform (which all Intel platforms mostly were, usually there were only two generations on an a socket with Intel as i remember it).

    Solid CPU for low price indeed! At the start of the year i built new system and came from ancient i5 4670k with DDR3 jumping to CU5 245KF which as you can imagine was what someone would call an real upgrade, hah! I timed the purchase just right around black friday and made some further savings with cpu (-50€ less than R5 9600X), M.2 ssd, GPU etc. which balanced the nasty DDR5 pricing.

    The dead end platform thing is bit tiring to hear as there is ton of folks who keeps the system longer than 5 years especially those who enjoys older games and eSport titles more. So for me going with AMD would not changed anything as i know i will be keeping this probably until DDR7 hits the market. Also as i`m playing with 1080P resolution using fairly affordable GPU RX9060 XT 16GB (slightly faster than RTX 5060) the speed differences with faster CPU seems to be very small as we can see below using BF5. I spent little bit extra for the GPU to have that 16GB card for future proofing so i´m sorted for long time. Came from GTX 1060 3GB. :sweatsmile:

    I got to say this 245KF similar to 250K/KF runs cool, quiet and draws small amount of juice at idle which is only positive as the computer is kept on long times and the electricity pricing in Europe is only going up thanks to these f**** data centers which they are building in the coming years. Long story short i`m really happy to see that Intel gets some love after so much s*it toward them!


    https://ibb.co/pBddV9MR
    https://ibb.co/q6SpH7K
    Reply