Intel's Arrow Lake desktop CPUs launched to underwhelming reviews, largely let down by their pricing compared to the competition. In our latest faceoff, the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K was neck-in-neck with AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X, while being more expensive (on the street). But that's what sales are for, and we've brought you a deal that finally fixes the value proposition of this SKU, thanks to Amazon Prime Big Deals Day. You can get the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K for just $489 — more than $100 off, making it the cheapest we've ever seen this CPU.
The Core Ultra 9 285K is a 24-core processor, with 8 P-Cores and 16 E-Cores, totaling 24 threads. It comes with a 36 MB of L3 cache and 40MB of L2 cache shared across core clusters. The P-Cores boost up to 5.7 GHz while the E-Cores can boost up to 4.6 GHz, all while maintaining a maximum 250W TDP. The 285K is fabricated on TSMC's N3P (3nm) process, which is actually a node advantage over the Ryzen 9000 series that's manufactured using the 4nm N4P. Just as a heads-up: you do need a new motherboard with the LGA1851 socket and DDR5 memory to pair with this CPU.
Intel has done an excellent job optimizing the 285K for low-power scenarios, like watching YouTube, where it consumes significantly less power than its AMD counterparts. In true idle states, due to Intel's hybrid architecture, only the E-core ring bus is engaged, allowing for superior efficiency. Intel also offers a more advanced overclocking suite — along with warrantied memory overclocking — allowing experienced users to unlock more performance compared to AMD's more streamlined approach.
As you can see in the charts above, the results are really close across the board. Unless you're actively comparing with the Ryzen 9 9950X, the Core Ultra 9 285K does a more-than-fine job in both gaming and productivity benchmarks. It's also important to note than the 9950X is currently more expensive on Amazon, so a genuine argument can be made for the 285K without accepting compromises. As long as superior gaming performance isn't your priority (get the X3D chips then, duh), the Core Ultra 9 285K is a great overall processor, now at a suitably-great price.
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.
