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.
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%.
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.
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, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.
