AMD has enjoyed being the preferred CPU vendor for the majority of gaming PCs for sometime now, but Intel’s latest refreshed chips are aiming to claw back some market share through competitive performance and aggressive pricing.
Intel has introduced two new CPUs into its Arrow Lake family, with the refreshed chips marking the debut of the Core Ultra 200S Plus series. First is the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus (including a KF variant without onboard graphics), which includes 18 total cores, divided into eight performance cores and 12 efficiency cores. This, along with a boost clock of 5.3GHz, puts it within spitting distance of the previous Core Ultra 7 265K, albeit with two fewer performance cores.
The second is likely the one that Intel is hoping will become a strong gaming choice. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, which includes a total of 24 cores divided into 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores, with a boost clock of 5.5GHz. That’s identical to Intel’s previous flagship, the Core Ultra 9 285K, for a fraction of the price.
The balance between price and performance is where Intel is hoping to make a more compellng case than before. These two new Plus chips arrive cheaper than the ones they’re meant to replace, which hasn’t been the case with new CPU releases in some time. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus launches at $300, while the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus will come in at $200. They’re aimed at competing with AMD’s Ryzen 5 9700X and Ryzen 7 9600X respectively on price alone, with Intel suggesting you’ll get better gaming performance with its newer chips.
Using a geomean of 38 games tested at 1080p with high settings in internal benchmarks, Intel says you can expect up to 15% better performance than its previous Arrow Lake chips at 1080p (a lower resolution where games exhibit CPU-limited scenarios over GPU-limited ones), with some examples such as Hitman 3 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider reaching well over 20%. The AMD Ryzen 5 9700X is traditionally faster than the older Core Ultra 7 265K in most games, but only marginally, which might give the newer Core Ultra 7 270K Plus a big advantage depending on the games you play.
These latest CPUs all run on the existing LGA 1851 socket, with new 800-series motherboards boasting official support for DDR5 running at 7,200MT/s. Intel is expected to reveal its next-generation CPUs later this year, which will truly answer whether the company is a reasonable option for gaming PCs again. Expect the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus to launch on March 26.