GoKawiilIntel’s Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is a productivity dominator at an unbelievable price, plus a nice boost in Arrow Lake gaming performance — too bad it’s on a platform that’s heading out the door.
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Arrow Lake was a dud. Intel transitioned from holding a compelling position against AMD among the best CPUs for gaming to being in a distant second place. While dealing with the instability controversy surrounding Raptor Lake Refresh, Intel released underperforming chips that, although architecturally interesting, were undermined not only by the competition from AMD, but also by Intel’s other 13th- and 14th-Gen offerings. Arrow Lake Refresh, officially dubbed Core Ultra 200S Plus, aims to change that narrative ahead of Intel’s true next-generation architecture, Nova Lake, which is on track for a release later this year.
For now, we have two new chips — the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus. We’re looking at the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus today, which arrives for $100 less than the Core Ultra 7 265K, while packing four more E-cores and a 900 MHz bump in die-to-die clock speed out of the box. All of the knobs and dials for overclocking that Intel introduced with Arrow Lake are still present, but the bump in die-to-die frequency is now stock; you don’t need a Z-series motherboard to unlock it, which Intel says was a conscious choice given the pricing conditions Core Ultra 200S Plus is arriving during.
Although the Core Ultra 7 270K is a refresh by definition, it performs more like a reset. It’s arriving too late, and in a market that’s increasingly hostile to PC enthusiasts, but it feels like the Core Ultra 7 we should’ve seen from the start. The efficiency angle of Arrow Lake is out the window in favor of squeezing out higher performance, and Intel’s promising Binary Optimization Tool finds further performance gains in lieu of strictly more silicon. Further pushing the reset angle is the price. Intel has clearly recognized its growing position as the underdog in the desktop PC market, and it priced the Core Ultra 7 270K aggressively to make up some ground that’s slowly slipped away.
In applications, the Core Ultra 7 270K is hard to believe– so difficult, in fact, that I had to rerun applications on the full Arrow Lake stack to make sure my numbers were correct. In games, it’s decent. Intel is able to squeeze out a marginal lead over AMD’s competing Ryzen 7 9700X , but AMD’s X3D offerings still hold a solid lead, though at a much higher price.
The rub with the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus isn’t performance. You’re getting a lot for your money here, more than we’ve seen from either Intel or AMD in several generations. It’s the platform. The LGA 1851 socket is on the way out, and Nova Lake is, according to Intel, coming before the calendar flips to 2027.
We’ve also tested the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, and you’ll see that testing reflected in our geomeans below. Our full Core Ultra 5 250K Plus review will go live tomorrow.
Intel Core Ultra 200S Plus ‘Arrow Lake Refresh’ Pricing and Specifications
Swipe to scroll horizontally CPU Street (MSRP) Cores / Threads (P+E) P-Core Base / Boost (GHz) E-Core Base / Boost (GHz) Cache (L2 + L3) TDP / MTP Memory Core Ultra 9 285K $530 ($589) 24 / 24 (8+16) 3.7 / 5.5 3.2 / 4.6 76 MB 125W / 250W 6400MT/s Core Ultra 7 270K Plus $300 24 / 24 (8+16) 3.7 / 5.4 3.2 / 4.7 76 MB 125W / 250W 7200MT/s Core Ultra 7 265K $270 ($394) 20 / 20 (8+12) 3.9 / 5.4 3.3 / 4.6 66 MB 125W / 250W 6400MT/s Core Ultra 5 250K Plus $200 18 / 18 (6+12) 4.2 / 5.3 3.3 / 4.6 60 MB 125W / 159W 7200MT/s Core Ultra 5 245K $200 ($309) 14 / 14 (6+8) 4.2 / 5.2 3.6 / 4.6 50 MB 125W / 159W 6400MT/s Core Ultra 5 225 $180 ($246) 10 / 10 (6+4) 3.3 / 4.9 2.7 / 4.4 42 MB 65W / 121W 6400MT/s
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