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Arrow Lake Refresh offers cheaper chips that still fall behind in games

Regardless of whether Intel would say it out loud, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus both represent an attempt to right the wrongs of the original Arrow Lake/Core Ultra 200S family. That bundle of chips was, necessarily, more power-efficient and cooler-running than the hotheaded 14th Gen models before them, though this came at the cost of hamstrung gaming performance. Rarely a desirable quality in a gaming CPU, that.

These two Core Ultra 200S Plus (or Arrow Lake Refresh) processors do, in comparison, achieve some appeal. They’re inexpensive and excellent multitaskers, and while they do still have efficiency on their silicon brains, Intel have looked to bump game speeds back up by rejigging their innards into a less latency-prone layout.

Alas, it’s not enough. Not only are Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus slower in games than AMD’s best chips, they once again fail to convincingly outpace Intel’s own back catalogue – the 2023 vintage 14th gen processors, included.

That’s especially unfortunate as the remedial measures Intel have taken for these chips are, on the face of it, sensible. Fingers may be pointed at the lack of major clock speed boosts: the 270K Plus’s 5.5GHz max boost clock is unchanged from the Core Ultra 7 265K’s, and the 250K Plus’ only rises to 5.3GHz, from 5.2GHz on the Core Ultra 5 245K. But previous Intel Core generations had been bumping up clock speeds for years, with little effect beyond increasingly troublesome temperatures.

Instead, the Core 200S Plus duo get 900MHz speed boosts to die-to-die (D2D) frequency, specifically addressing a problem with the original Core 200S models where the once-unified memory and compute controllers had been split into different tiles and spread across the processor. This is good for power efficiency, but introduces latency, as the disparate components need extra time to communicate with one another; an increase in D2D frequency should quicken this process, and get games performance back towards where it was when Intel chips were still monolithic.

These CPUs are also the first to wield Intel’s Binary Optimization Tool (apologies for the z, fellow Brits, that’s what it says here). A new component of the Intel Application Optimization (gargh) app, this tool supposedly speeds up certain games that were designed with older processors in mind. Or, rather, it speeds up how the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus can process them, producing game-specific increases in instructions per clock (IPC). That basically means the chips can get more done in each CPU clock cycle, uplifting performance without needing to raise clock speeds (and thus temperatures) themselves. It’s clever stuff, on paper.

In terms of testing all of this out, I may have slightly fired a .44 magnum cartridge directly through the ol’ metatarsals by being so disinterested in the original Arrow Lake chips that I never recorded proper benchmark results for them. For the requisite bar graph competition, though, I still think it makes sense to hold these new parts up to the 14th genners, which remain both the more likely subjects of "Should I upgrade?" ponderings and the most reliably high-performing Intel chips of the past few years. I’ve also thrown in the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D – if Intel are serious about the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus being their "fastest ever" gaming CPU, then they surely won’t mind comparisons to a top performer from the Ryzen camp.

This is obviously not great reading, from the Arrow Lake Refresh perspective. The two new chips could be called an improvement, but only in the sense that they are now roughly as fast as the 14th generation, not repeatedly worse. And they still fall behind in Total War: Warhammer III, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus not even equalling the years-old Core i5-14600K.

The only real win here is in Cyberpunk 2077, where the 250K Plus does actually beat its ancestor by a meaningful margin, and the 270K Plus just sneaks ahead of the former flagship Core i9-14900K. Credit where it’s due, that feat is repeated in Returnal and very nearly achieved in Warhammer III. Given the newer CPU is also a good 10% slower in F1 2024, mind, that "fastest ever" claim comes with a big, bold-type asterisk . It’s also, quite clearly, nowhere near the Ryzen 7 9800X3D’s level.

Binary Optimization, it turns out, is of limited usefulness as well. Part of that is just inherent to the tool’s lack of widespread game support (barely over a dozen, at launch), but even when it works, it’s not much of a magic go-faster button. In Cyberpunk 2077, enabling the tool nudged the 270K Plus up from 233fps to 243fps: a mere 4% boost, in a game that was already more generous to Arrow Lake Refresh than most. The 250K Plus also climbed from 224fps to 233fps, another teeny 4% rise, though this does at least show – if you’re more inclined towards mid-rangers – that Binary Optimization can at least get Core Ultra 5 hardware up to Core Ultra 7 standards of performance. In certain games. And conditions. And assuming you don’t just enable the same tool on an Ultra 7 as well.

All the same, I can’t bring myself to get as huffy about Arrow Lake Refresh as I did about Intel’s preceding misfire. Factoring into that is the apparently earnest attempt at making amends on game performance, if it was ultimately a doomed one. More practically, there are other things this CPU duo does much, much better.

Multitasking and productivity are two. Get your PC doing something that can take better advantage of multiple threads than games, be it editing, encoding, or if you’re into that sort of thing, livestreaming, and both the Core Ultra 270K Plus and Core Ultra 250K Plus will juggle the workloads far more deftly than their older alternatives. Even if the 270K Plus isn’t entirely Intel’s fastest gaming CPU, it might well be their highest-scoring mainstream CPU in Cinebench’s simulated benchmark tests, and the 250K Plus finally nails down an outright victory over the Core i5-14600K here too.

Again, I don’t have results for their original 200S equivalents, though smart money is still on the newer CPUs: both have an additional four E-cores (E for Efficiency) over their pre-Refresh equivalents. While these aren’t as big and beefy as their accompanying P-cores (P for Performance), they still add four extra threads for the CPU to play with, and with minimal extra strain on power or thermals.

Speaking of, both chips remain nicely cool, even on the budget-friendly Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE air cooler I’d tested them with. Whereas the same setup had the Core i9-14900K’s P-cores peaking at 90°c in games, even hitting the danger zone of 100°c during Cinebench runs, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus only went as high as 76°c while playing, and stuck to a safe 90°c at its benchmarking peak. The Core Ultra 250K Plus was even chillier, peaking at 68°c in games (down from 77c° on the Core i5-14600K) and 74°c in Cinebench (down from 82°c). With the exception of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D’s 88°c peak temp in Cinebench, both chips were also consistently cooler than that AMD bigshot.

The fact that these processors can run on cheap coolers is particularly welcome at a time when memory shortages are driving component prices – and by extension, the cost of new PC builds – painfully skywards. And that’s not to mention how aggressively priced these CPUs are themselves: at $300 for the 270K Plus and $200 for the 250K Plus, these average around $100 less than the equivalent Arrow Lake pieces, with the former notably coming in nearly $200 cheaper than the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. That, alone, could pay for a decently specced motherboard (if not, regretfully, a good set of RAM) to go with it.

This is expected to be the last generation of Intel CPUs to fit the LGA 1851 socket, so any new mobo won’t get to carry over any future chip upgrades. But then, the CPU isn’t the kind of component you’ll be swapping out frequently anyway.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus do have their place, then, as affordable multithreading engines. It’s also encouraging to see that Intel really have got a grip on temperatures; the 14900K, especially, was way too ready to hit boiling point.

It’s just that for games, specifically, they’re still not preferable to a shiny new Ryzen, or even to upgrading from any reasonably non-ancient Intel platform. Right now, you’re not going to see worthwhile improvements over an existing 14th or likely even 13th gen Core equivalent, while AMD’s 3D V-Cache tech still has Intel licked at the enthusiast end.

On that note, the most prudent buying decision of all may be to simply wait. Intel have yet another CPU family, Nova Lake, set to launch later this very year, and word is they’ll have their own answer to 3D V-Cache in the form of BLLC (Big Last-Level Cache). Throwing vast memory stores at game framerates may not sound as elegant as something like D2D optimisations, but hey, it’s been working for AMD for years – and it’s clearly time for Intel to try something different, at least to themselves.

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