Name: Intel is BACK. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. - Core Ultra 270K Plus & 250K Plus CPU Review
Uploaded: 2026-03-28T21:38:04.000Z
Duration: 11 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - B1

You might think the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is the best gaming CPU on the market,

but as of today that all does not change.

The second conditional

But what if I told you that you could get 95% of its performance for 60% of the price?

That is what Intel has bequeathed upon the land with their Ultra 7 270K Plus.

Anyways, take a look at this: in Cities: Skylines 2, Intel's Ultra 7 270K Plus outpaces both of their previous flagships and is nipping at the heels of the 9800X3D.

And what's even crazier is that the second chip that they announced, the Ultra 5 250K Plus, is also a flagship killer.

Oh, right, and I haven't even mentioned price.

The 270K and the 250K are dropping at a mere $300 and $200 respectively, prices that are actually lower than the launch prices of the CPUs they are meant to replace.

And moving into Cyberpunk, the winning streak continues.

Intel's 270K Plus is on the podium, while the 250K Plus outperforms the 14900K and the Ryzen 9950X.

It just sits slightly underneath the 265K in 1% lows,

but it actually has an edge in average FPS.

But AMD's chips also have an edge in average frame rates, which is why I am again emphasizing the importance of 1% lows.

Those are what indicates a smoother gaming experience.

But what is good and also true is this in-depth review of Intel's newest CPUs and this segue to our sponsor.

Continuing with our 1080p gaming results, in F1 24 we see AMD's whole lineup faring pretty well, with the 9700X going above and beyond and overtaking the 270K Plus and the i9-14900K.

The new 250K Plus trails the 9600X, although not by much.

But Intel's dominance is seriously challenged in Counter-Strike 2, where their new high-end hotness only barely catches AMD's mid-range 9600X.

At least Intel's new CPUs are outperforming their own team, except for the 14900K.

When we take all of our gaming tests into consideration, it would seem that Intel has fulfilled their marketing claim.

The Ultra 7 270K Plus is the fastest gaming CPU Intel's ever built, even if it's not the fastest gaming CPU anyone's ever built, landing just 5% shy of AMD's 9800X3D in 1% lows and 10% behind an average frame rate.

It beats the 9600X by 5 to 10% or more depending on the game, whilst demanding a very small price premium.

But before you scream shill, let's address the elephant in the room and talk about why we didn't compare these new Intel chips to AMD's 9850X3D, their more recent fastest gaming CPU.

Unfortunately, we can't test every CPU on the market, so we opted to represent the 9800X3D instead of the 9850X3D because more of you guys are currently running it,

and it's also very close in performance to the 9850X3D.

And if we're being entirely honest, we did not expect Intel to compete at the very top of these performance charts.

But if you are looking for even more data, keep an eye on lttlabs.com, where we are always adding new tests to compare.

So what changes under the hood did Intel make to refresh their Arrow Lake CPUs and get these impressive results?

Well, first off, they bumped up the clocks all-core boost on the PE cores with the new processors.

They also tweaked uncore frequencies--uncore meaning everything that's not the cores--and they've improved die-to-die performance and I/O frequency, meaning faster communication to the parts within the CPU and to the other components in your system, which allowed them to support higher-speed memory.

Oh, right, and there's just plain more CPU.

Both of these new chips bring in extra four E-cores and some bonus shared cache along for the ride, which makes the naming of these CPUs really confusing.

Why does the Ultra 7 270K Plus have the same number of cores as the Ultra 9 285K,

Shouldn't the higher number CPU be better?

I mean, at least the 250K Plus actually has fewer cores than the 265K, so something makes sense there.

But even there, in terms of performance, the 250K Plus is looking more like a replacement for the 265K rather than the 245K.

So what are they thinking with these names?

It's tough to say, but the main thing Intel wants you to focus on is the Plus.

Apparently, this new convention is going to indicate that it's for enthusiasts.

Intel, whatever you're paying your marketing division, it is too much.

And whatever you're paying your engineers, it ain't enough.

Intel made some big claims in their announcement about multi-core performance, saying that the 250K Plus has a 103% lead over the 9600X.

In Blender, the 250K Plus just pummels AMD's price competitors,

and at the high end, the 270K Plus is neck and neck with the 9950X.

In Cinebench, well, bow to your new multi-core king as the 270K Plus tops the charts with his brother Duke 250K Plus outperforming his counterparts.

On the other hand, in single-core performance, the higher boost on the 285K and 265K keep them positioned above their Plus-named heirs.

If you're looking to decompress, you can relax knowing that these new chips also perform well in 7-Zip, even if they are a step below royalty.

But in pretty much every workload, the Plus CPUs are either fighting for the top spot or absolutely dominating in price to performance.

Except in Photoshop, where there is a clear platform preference for AMD.

But outside of that, Intel has stolen back the productivity crowd, especially considering price to performance.

So don't ignore them if you're doing any sort of productivity work in addition to your gaming.

Let's say this in a way Twitch streamers can understand.

Intel is value-maxing and absolutely price-mogging AMD.

After several generations of power-hungry CPUs, Intel slayed the power efficiency dragon with Arrow Lake.

But CPU refreshes often result in power consumption increases.

Well, in gaming, power usage on the 250K Plus and 270K Plus has increased by 10% or more compared to their non-Plus brethren,

but on the whole have a lower average and max power consumption than AMD's chips in F1 24.

And Intel's doing this while being pretty competitive in performance too.

In Cinebench, we can see that Intel is still happy to let their chips let loose with power to really maximize performance, even if it comes at the cost of efficiency.

But still, Intel might make up the difference by having quite good idle power draw, especially compared to AMD.

And this well-managed power curve on the new chips translates to well-managed thermals on our Arctic Liquid Freezer 3 360mm CLAD test benches.

And even when drawing full power, they perform well under their rated max temp.

Remember, the TJ Maxx for these CPUs is 105 degrees compared to AMD's 95.

And the crazy thing is that if you really want to push your chip or if you're just heinously thermally constrained, Intel will let you set your temperature budget to 115 degrees Celsius and still honor the warranty.

It sounds great so far, yeah, but there's still more to talk about.

Intel has a few tricks up their sleeves, and it's in the form of software enhancements.

The Intel Binary Optimization Tool, or iBOT, is part of their application optimizer software,

and Intel considers this to be a core part of their long-term performance strategy.

Basically, what it does is analyze the functions being called by an application and redirects the call to a function that's better optimized for Intel hardware.