But bear in mind Intel’s pricing here—at $199 and $299, these CPUs’ most direct competition is coming from AMD’s 6- and 8-core non-X3D processors, in particular the Ryzen 9600X, 7700X, and 9700X. We don’t have one to test, but the Ryzen 7600X3D also sits right around $300 and could be an option if game performance is way more important to you than any other kind of performance.

We’ve generally stuck to the default power settings for all the chips, though we did use the higher-performing 105 W power setting for the Ryzen 9700X.

The refreshed Arrow Lake chips are respectable upgrades over the old ones, and despite the Core Ultra 7 branding, the 270K generally ends up beating the old Core Ultra 9 285K by a small amount in most of the tests we ran, effectively making it Intel’s flagship desktop CPU.

Multi-core tests like the Cinebench benchmarks and the Handbrake video encoding tests show especially large gains for the Core Ultra 5 250K relative to the old 245K, thanks to the extra cluster of E-cores. And it runs circles around the 7700X and 9700X, which currently sell for $50 and $100 more than their MSRP. It thoroughly trounces the Ryzen 9600X, which is selling for around the same $200 price.

The Core Ultra 7 270K’s multi-core performance also puts it ahead of both the Ryzen 7950X and 9950X, chips that sell for quite a bit more than $300. Compared to previous-generation Intel chips, the 270K and 250K are definitely faster than their 14th- and 13th-generation equivalents in multi-core performance tests, but the more significant improvement is still temperature and power efficiency under load. While both the 270K and 250K consume more power under load than the 285K and 245K, they’re still way more efficient (and run much cooler) than 13th- and 14th-generation chips in heavy multi-core workloads and while gaming.