is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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Intel hasn’t made it easy to buy a flagship desktop chip. The company’s 2022 and 2023 Raptor Lake chips ran hot, power-hungry, and had those infamous crashes, while 2024’s Arrow Lake-based Core Ultra 9 285K had lackluster gaming performance that the company has tried to address with updates.
Now, Intel claims it has finally surpassed both predecessors with “Intel’s fastest gaming desktop processors ever”: the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and 250K Plus, shipping March 26th.
While we don’t have every detail today, the company claims the 24-core, 5.5GHz turbo Core Ultra 7 270K Plus can beat both the Raptor Lake i9-14900K and the Arrow Lake Ultra 9 285K in gaming performance — and with 24 cores, 24 threads and a $300 price, it could compete favorably in productivity against AMD’s Ryzen 7 9700X as well.
Image: Intel
This is where enthusiasts will probably note that AMD’s 9700X is nowhere near the most potent gaming chip that AMD makes, and is also a year and a half old… but for $300 and nearly double the claimed multithreaded performance, the Intel chip may turn some heads when it comes to multithreaded workloads on a budget.
Image: Intel
The 250K Plus may be a similar story at $200, with a claimed 103 percent better multicore performance on average than the similarly priced AMD 9600X.
Intel’s slidedeck doesn’t actually show how much faster gaming performance might be compared to its previous flagship chips, let alone AMD’s chips — instead, Intel compares the 270K Plus and 250K Plus directly to their immediate predecessors, the 265K and 245K, respectively.
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