Intel hasn't made it easy to buy a top-of-the-line desktop processor. The Raptor Lake were notorious for overheating, high power consumption, and infamous crashes, while the 2024 Core Ultra 9 285K, based on the Arrow Lake architecture, had disappointing gaming performance, which the company has tried to improve with updates.
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Now, Intel claims to have surpassed its predecessors with the "fastest desktop gaming processors" it has ever made: the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and 250K Plus, which will be released on March 26th.
Although we don't have all the details today, the company claims that the 24-core, with a turbo frequency of 5.5GHz, Core Ultra 7 270K Plus can outpace both the Raptor Lake i9-14900K and the Arrow Lake Ultra 9 285K in gaming performance. With 24 cores, 24 threads and a price of $300, it could also compete favorably in productivity against AMD's Ryzen 7 9700X.
Here, enthusiastic users will likely note that the AMD 9700X is not the most powerful gaming processor AMD makes and is also a year and a half old. However, for $300 and almost double performance in multithreaded tasks, Intel's processor can attract attention for multithreaded tasks on a budget.
The 250K Plus could have a similar story at a price of $200, with a claimed 103% better multi-core workload performance on average compared to the AMD 9600X at a similar price.
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Intel's presentation does not show how much faster gaming performance can be compared to its previous flagship processors or AMD's processors. Instead, Intel directly compares the 270K Plus and 250K Plus with their immediate predecessors, the 265K and 245K, respectively.
The improvements can be moderate, up to 4% in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, but up to 39% in Shadow of the Tomb Raider with the new Intel Binary Optimization Tool enabled, which is an innovative translation-layer level optimization capability that can improve native performance in selected games.
Aside from the Binary Optimization Tool, Intel notes that these improvements in the Arrow Lake refresh include four additional efficiency cores, a 200MHz faster base frequency on the P-cores, a 100MHz faster base frequency on the E-cores, a 900MHz faster link between the CPU and the memory controller, support for DDR5 7200 MT/s memory and early support for 4-rank CUDIMM memory modules, provided that your Intel 800 series motherboard supports them.
Both processors continue to operate with a TDP of 125W like their immediate predecessors. The 270K now has a base frequency of 4.1GHz on the P-cores and 3.4GHz on the E-cores, while the 250K's frequencies start at 4.4GHz and 3.7GHz respectively. The 250K has 30MB Smart Cache, up from 24MB on the 245K, while the 270K still has 36MB.
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The Intel Core Ultra 200S Plus desktop processors will maintain compatibility with all 800-series chipset motherboards currently on the market. New 800-series chipset motherboard models will be released to the market throughout ’ the entire duration of 2026, including models that allow early support for 4‑Rank CUDIMM memory. KF variants of the processors (without integrated graphics) will also be available.
