Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus drops below MSRP for the first time — grab the 24-core Arrow Lake Refresh chip for just $279 for a limited time

If you are planning to upgrade or build a new gaming/productivity PC, Intel's latest Arrow Lake Refresh chip, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, is worth checking out right now. The chip is $20 off its highly competitive $299 MSRP on Amazon, making the 24-core champ just $65 more expensive than its mid-range Core Ultra 5 250K Plus counterpart and noticeably cheaper than any of its competitors, including the Ryzen 7 9700X. This is a limited-time deal on Amazon, so grab it while you can.

Check out this deal on Amazon

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is one of the most competitive CPUs under $300, whether you're building a dedicated gaming machine, work machine, or a hybrid system that does both. The chip is part of Intel's Arrow Lake Refresh, boasting 24 cores in total, 8 P-cores, 16 E-cores, and 76 MB of L2 and L3 cache. The chip also boosts up to 5.4GHz on the P-cores, and 4.7GHz on the E-cores. With the 270K Plus, Intel addressed Arrow Lake's architecture pain points, including boosting the clock speed of the internal fabric and matching the chip's core count with the Core Ultra 9 285K, all while slashing the chip's MSRP by $100 compared to the Core Ultra 7 265K.

In our review, we found the CPU dominates heavily multi-threaded tasks to the point of beating the flagship AMD Ryzen 9 9950X in Cinebench 2026 and Geekbench 6. In more real-world workloads, such as Intraframe processing in DaVinci Resolve and RAW image Decoding, the 270K Plus was near the top of our charts, with performance approaching that of the fastest CPUs we've tested in those applications. The only applications where the 270K Plus struggled were in certain applications, such as Blender, where AMD chips generally dominate.

In gaming, the chip is also competitive; it's nowhere near the capabilities of the fastest AMD Ryzen chips with 3D-VCache technology, but against any other chip remotely close to $300, it dominates. In other words, the 270K Plus is almost always the fastest gaming chip we've tested outside of AMD's X3D parts. In our average gaming performance goemean at 1080p, the 270K Plus matched the Core i9-14900K and trailed the Ryzen 5 7600X3D by just 5%.

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Best CPUs for Gaming — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

If you don't already have an AM5 setup and are looking to build a new rig or upgrade an existing system, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is unquestionably the best CPU you can buy for under $300, especially if you need a chip that can handle heavy multi-threaded workloads. For raw gaming, chips such as the Ryzen 7 7800X3D are better, but for under $300, there is nothing better than the 270K Plus for gaming. The CPU was already a killer deal at its initial MSRP, and its competitiveness is even better with Amazon's $20 discount.

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

14 Comments Comment from the forums

Marlin1975

CPU could be free and still cost to much to build a new computer.
Ram, hard drive, and GPU alone are bonkers. MBs are up also.
Unless you already have EVERYTHING other than a CPU; its not a good time to build.
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usertests

Marlin1975 said:
CPU could be free and still cost to much to build a new computer.
Ram, hard drive, and GPU alone are bonkers. MBs are up also.
Unless you already have EVERYTHING other than a CPU; its not a good time to build.
The demand for Arrow Lake Refresh, and therefore the price, could be falling in response to all that.

It's a bad time to build, but also a time for people to gamble on whether or not it will be worse in a year or two. If the nightmare scenarios happen, today's prices will look like a good deal.
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Eximo

I saw the memory prices rising, decided against a DDR5 upgrade. Bought a 14700k at black Friday. I'm going to try and ride that until DDR6 is a thing.
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vanadiel007

Looks like prices are going to go up some more, with the expected Samsung labor dispute.
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Marlin1975

usertests said:
The demand for Arrow Lake Refresh, and therefore the price, could be falling in response to all that.

It's a bad time to build, but also a time for people to gamble on whether or not it will be worse in a year or two. If the nightmare scenarios happen, today's prices will look like a good deal.

If interest rates go up, looks like they might, the easy money funding all this AI madness will start to dry up. Heck companies are already laying off to free up more money. So first rate hike, even 1/4 point, may be a hard pill to swallow for some.

Not saying it will happen this year. But if someone can wait I would till next year at least.
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cp0x

Admin said:
Intel's latest Core Ultra 7 270K Plus 24-core CPU is $20 off on Amazon, bringing its price down to just $279.

Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus drops below MSRP for the first time — grab the 24-core Arrow Lake Refresh chip for just $279 for a limited time : Read more
Look, it's a nice little chip, and worth considering for a non-gaming build.

But why does Tom's Hardware always have to bend the truth and lie in order to try to hype Intel chips? Seriously, the 7800x3d has been around $300 for years. I picked mine up several years ago for $318, and you can currently get it, and a motherboard, and 32GB of RAM (over $300 just for the RAM!) for under $600 at Microcenter. Why would any gamer look at the Intel offering when the AMD 7800x3d is faster, cheaper, and better?

(Edit: Actually, Microcenter also has the 270k plus and a motherboard and 32GB RAM for the same just-under-$600 price as the AMD bundle, so the AMD 7800x3d is the same price as the 270k plus.)

I remember when this Intel chip came out, and Tom's was lying about the price in order to make it sound more compelling in the review. Now the price has finally come down to a decent level, and Tom's is lying about the prices of everything else to make it sound more compelling. Give it up already.
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TerryLaze

cp0x said:
Look, it's a nice little chip, and worth considering for a non-gaming build.

But why does Tom's Hardware always have to bend the truth and lie in order to try to hype Intel chips? Seriously, the 7800x3d has been around $300 for years. I picked mine up several years ago for $318, and you can currently get it, and a motherboard, and 32GB of RAM (over $300 just for the RAM!) for under $600 at Microcenter. Why would any gamer look at the Intel offering when the AMD 7800x3d is faster, cheaper, and better?

(Edit: Actually, Microcenter also has the 270k plus and a motherboard and 32GB RAM for the same just-under-$600 price as the AMD bundle, so the AMD 7800x3d is the same price as the 270k plus.)

I remember when this Intel chip came out, and Tom's was lying about the price in order to make it sound more compelling in the review. Now the price has finally come down to a decent level, and Tom's is lying about the prices of everything else to make it sound more compelling. Give it up already.
Percentage wise....how many tom's readers do you think have access to a microcenter?
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usertests

I checked Newegg and I saw 16 GB (2x8GB) for around $240 ($15/GB), and 32 GB for $370 ($11.56/GB). I could understand someone going to 16 GB to save some cash but the higher price-per-GB is a tough pill to swallow. Then there's the real compromise: 1x16GB to save another $40 and allowing you to get mismatched RAM later.

The latest CPUs have the problem of being too good for most users. You can save more by reaching back to the DDR4 era. But there are still high SSD/HDD/GPU prices. It's a good time to get into "retro" gaming on iGPU or a used RX 580, etc.

Marlin1975 said:
If interest rates go up, looks like they might, the easy money funding all this AI madness will start to dry up. Heck companies are already laying off to free up more money. So first rate hike, even 1/4 point, may be a hard pill to swallow for some.

Not saying it will happen this year. But if someone can wait I would till next year at least.
It could definitely go that way. Although I think the AI "madness" could persist into 2028-2030, and a big player like OpenAI or Anthropic could be knocked down and bought up by a tech giant without popping the bubble.

But I was alluding to a potential invasion of Taiwan in 2027. If you think prices are bad now, double or triple the price of every new and used component in your head. Although this is supposedly considered delayed. Oh, and you can bet on it on Polymarket.

TerryLaze said:
Percentage wise....how many tom's readers do you think have access to a microcenter?
Are we counting the readers who will drive 10 hours round-trip to reach teccha? I've heard that people have made a mini-vacation out of it.
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Geef

My CPU is sort of old, 12600k but not old enough to grab 270k even though it's amazing. My CPU plays the games it needs to so I'll wait for next gen. Nova Lake. I think I'll go big with a 28 core chip 144MB L3 Cache. Probably a huge cost but I'm saving!

🕺Hey Bay'bay, Wanna see my cache? It's 144MB long! 👀💃
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TerryLaze

usertests said:
Are we counting the readers who will drive 10 hours round-trip to reach teccha? I've heard that people have made a mini-vacation out of it.
Sure, make it the best case, it's till going to be a very low number even for only US people.
Tom's is a website that people from the whole world are reading...
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