Intel's Core Ultra 270K, 250K Plus are an appeal to cash-strapped PC enthusiasts

Summary

Review It's a tough time to be a PC enthusiast. Between the memory crunch and the AI boom driving up prices on storage, DDR5, and GPUs, it's gotten prohibitively expensive to build a PC. Amid this turmoil, Intel hopes to win some goodwill from budget-conscious customers with its newly announced Core Ultra 200S Plus family of desktop processors. The new chips boast higher core counts, more aggressive frequency curves, and, more importantly, are launching at much lower prices this time around. At $199 and $299 respectively, Intel's all-new Ultra 5 250K and Ultra 7 270K reflect a level of market awareness that we haven't seen from Chipzilla in quite a while. Intel's Arrow Lake refresh is its most compelling value proposition in years. And, while the chips can't contend with AMD's cache-stacked X3D parts in gaming, they're significantly cheaper while also delivering strong performance in production workloads thanks to all those extra efficiency cores. In this review, we'll be digging into the good, bad, and the ugly of Intel's latest generation of desktop CPUs covering everything from office productivity to HPC, and yes, gaming. But first let's take a closer look at Intel's latest chips. The chips The overarching theme for Intel's Arrow Lake refresh is more cores per dollar. Both Core Ultra 5 and Ultra 7 Plus processors gain four additional efficiency (E-cores) over last gen. With 24 cores (8-P and 16-E cores), this puts the 270K in direct contention with Intel's 285K. The new Ultra 7 doesn't clock as high, with a max turbo 200 MHz slower than the flagship. But, for many, those lower clocks are more than worth the lower MSRP. The new Core Ultra 5 250K enjoys similar gains. The chip now boasts 6-P cores and 12-E cores for a total of 18 cores and 18 threads. Remember that there's no hyperthreading (SMT) this generation. At least as far as core count goes, the part is essentially a Core Ultra 7 265K that's had two of its P-cores fused off and its frequency tables remapped....