This feels like a rebuilding year for Intel. With AMD’s Ryzen processors going from strength to strength and thermal degradation issues dogging Intel’s last desktop CPUs, Team Blue has unveiled a new tile-based architecture for both mobile CPUs (Lunar Lake) and desktop CPUs (Arrow Lake S). Lunar Lake arrived to generally positive reviews, with excellent power efficiency, AI hardware support and reasonable performance, so can the new Core Ultra 200S desktop chips pull off the same trick?
To find out, we’ve tested the Core Ultra 9 285K and Ultra 5 245K, which Intel promises offer ballpark similar gaming performance and improved content creation performance versus existing 14th-gen parts while delivering significantly better power efficiency. The bulk of our review focuses around exactly how close the 285K and 245K can get in terms of game benchmarks – with 11 games in our burgeoning new test suite! – but we’ve also tested video production and 3D modelling workloads alongside some basic power analysis.
These new Core 200S processors also come with a new desktop socket, LGA 1851, and a new series of motherboards, starting with the Z890 chipset. MSI and Asus have both provided high-end boards for testing, which we’ll cover briefly, but the main thing to know is that existing LGA 1700 coolers are compatible with the new motherboards, they feature more PCIe bandwidth and support memory overclocking up to DDR5-9200. Thunderbolt 4 and WiFi 6E is required and WiFi 7 and/or Thunderbolt 5 is to be expected on most high-end boards, alongside up to 10-gig wired networking.
| CPU Cores | Boost | L3 Cache | L2 Cache | Max Power | RRP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ultra 9 285K | 24 (8P + 16E) | 5.7GHz | 36MB | 40MB | 250W | $589 |
| Ultra 7 265K | 20 (8P + 12E) | 5.5GHz | 30MB | 36MB | 250W | $394 |
| Ultra 7 265KF | 20 (8P + 12E) | 5.5GHz | 30MB | 36MB | 250W | $379 |
| Ultra 5 245K | 14 (6P + 8E) | 5.2GHz | 24MB | 26MB | 159W | $309 |
| Ultra 5 245KF | 14 (6P + 8E) | 5.2GHz | 24MB | 26MB | 159W | $294 |
Before we get into our results, let’s briefly cover off the spread of the field. Arrow Lake S includes five SKUs at present, from the top-of-the-line Ultra 9 285K – similar to the Core i9 tier from previous generations – to the mid-range Ultra 5 245K, which compares to previous Core i5 products. There are -F variants, denoting no onboard graphics capabilities, but an NPU for accelerating AI workloads is included across the stack.