GoKawiilArrow Lake fell far short of expectations from gamers and enthusiasts. It was a one-two punch for Intel, not only falling short of AMD’s competition on the X3D front in games, but also barely matching the regular Zen 5 range in applications.
Now, Intel is trying to make a big impact with Arrow Lake Refresh. Intel has launched the Core Ultra 270K Plus and 250K Plus at competitive price points in an effort to regain some of the ground they lost with Arrow Lake, and both chips have earned a spot among the best CPUs for gaming .
Even with a big leap forward, AMD holds the cards on the gaming front. Chips like the Ryzen 7 9850X3D rule the roost, and even the last-gen Ryzen 7 7800X3D is holding its own. Intel is catching up quickly, however, especially with the 270K Plus, and without access to the massive cache available on X3D chips.
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Is the Ryzen 7 7800X3D still fast enough to beat the newly-launched Core Ultra 7 270K Plus? Or should you go for the newer Intel chip for its productivity benefits and advanced architecture? That is what we are going to uncover in today’s faceoff by putting these two CPUs through a gauntlet of tests based on the data from our CPU benchmark hierarchy .
If you’d like to compare these chips more broadly, make sure to read our Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review and AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D review .
Features and Specifications: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D
Swipe to scroll horizontally Intel 'Arrow Lake' Core Ultra 200S Series — Pricing and Specifications CPU Street (MSRP) Arch Cores / Threads (P+E) P-Core Base / Boost Clock (GHz) E-Core Base / Boost Clock (GHz) Cache (L2/L3) TDP / PBP or MTP Memory Core Ultra 7 270K Plus $330 ($300) Arrow Lake Refresh 24 / 24 (8+16) 3.7 / 5.4 3.2 / 4.7 76MB (40+36) 125W / 250W DDR5-7200 Ryzen 7 7800X3D $374($449) Zen 5 8 / 16 3.8 / 5.5 N/A 40MB (8+32) 65W / 88W (105W / 142W) DDR5-5600
Arrow Lake Refresh is more of an iterative update than a radical rethink. Under the hood, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus has the same architecture as the older Core Ultra 7 265K, with a few tweaks to the silicon. It is built using the same 3nm production process from TSMC, and contains 8 Lion Cove P-cores and 16 Skymont E-cores. The total count for the 270K Plus is 24 cores (8P+16E) and 24 threads in total, matching the higher-end 285K.
Intel also altered the clock speeds on the 270K Plus. The new chip can boost to 5.5 GHz on the P-Cores, with the E-Cores boosting to 4.7 GHz. Of course, you can manually overclock the CPU as well, given its unlocked multiplier. The bigger boost comes from uncore frequency, particularly in a 900 MHz boost in die-to-die frequency and a 400 MHz jump with the memory controller.
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