GoKawiilCPU reviews aren’t made equally. They should, and do, follow the same process. I double-check everything on the test bed is the same, run a gauntlet of benchmarks using the same software stack and OS configuration, and spit the results out into various spreadsheets to eventually turn that raw data into hundreds of graphs for you to peruse. But the ups and downs during that process can vary wildly, and I was caught on the extreme end of that variation with Intel’s new Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus.
Blindly running benchmarks and throwing the data into a chart is a quick way to come to bunk conclusions. PCs and benchmarks aren’t perfect, and when you run as many benchmarks as we do here at Tom’s Hardware, it’s inevitable that you’ll encounter some strange results. The challenge with Intel's 270K Plus and 250K Plus was that those strange, unbelievable results were actually representative of the real performance of the chips. I spent no less than 50 hours (and probably more) simply rerunning benchmarks on various CPUs because I didn’t believe the results I was seeing.
That’s the best compliment I can give Intel’s small but potent range of Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs. There are still problems with them, and I want to make that clear lest this devolves into some marketing slop about unbelievable benchmark results. But the fact remains that I spent a lot of extra time sanity checking, because the performance was so impressive, and that’s worth closer examination.
Article continues below
The launch dust has settled on the 270K Plus and 250K Plus. The comparisons are in and the conclusion is clear: Intel made some compelling, value-oriented CPUs. Here, I’m going to take you behind the scenes of the testing process, as well as break down why these two CPUs are so important for Intel.
Arrow Lake is difficult to benchmark
There’s no other way to put it: Arrow Lake is annoying to benchmark. To avoid massive retests hours before a review embargo lifts, I’m constantly checking results against other data I’ve gathered to make sure my testing is on track. It’s much easier to quickly rerun a test with an odd result than it is to realize your data is off after you’ve already gone through a dozen CPUs. These checkpoints are even more important when working under an NDA. You’re working in a vacuum, bound contractually not to compare your results with other reviewers.
In generations past, it was pretty easy to know if you could trust the data you were seeing, but not with Arrow Lake. Even when the first CPUs rolled out, Intel made it clear that there would be performance regressions in some workloads. Further, there are still some workloads that do not play nicely with Intel’s Arrow Lake’s SoC-like CPU architecture.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
Overall, the 270K Plus is about as fast as the Core i9-14900K and 2.4% faster than the Ryzen 7 9700X in games at 1080p. But in Minecraft, the Ryzen 7 9700X is nearly 50% faster. There are reasons why Arrow Lake chips perform poorly in this particular game: namely, how the maximum render chunk distance stresses the memory chain throughout your system, but the reasons aren’t important. When working in a vacuum, it’s hard to take these extreme outliers at face value.
... continue reading