Pros & Cons
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- Exceptionally low price for a 24-core CPU
- Potent raw CPU performance
- Boosted gaming speeds versus previous generation, when used with a discrete graphics card
- Powerful integrated graphics
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- Low-resolution/high-frame-rate gaming still lags behind AMD's Ryzen X3D chips
Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus Specs
| Base Clock Frequency | 3.7 |
| Bundled Cooler | None |
| Core Count | 24 |
| Integrated Graphics | Intel Xe LPG |
| Integrated Graphics Base Clock | 2000 |
| L3 Cache Amount | 36 |
| Lithography | 3 |
| Maximum Boost Clock | 5.5 |
| Socket Compatibility | Intel LGA1851 |
| Thermal Design Power (TDP) Rating | 250 |
| Thread Count | 24 |
| Unlocked Multiplier? |
Intel, with its Core Ultra 200S processors, popularly known as the "Arrow Lake" family, ambitiously adopted a chiplet-style CPU design and package. While technologically advanced, Arrow Lake's first take suffered from particularly weak gaming performance compared with competing AMD chips. Now, though, Intel is rolling out a 2026 refreshed version of Arrow Lake for desktops, dubbed the Core Ultra 200S Plus line.
With its Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, Intel has improved the Arrow Lake design and production process to boost gaming speeds, while slashing prices. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is Intel’s new tip of the spear, leading this new 200S Plus line. At just $299, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus has the raw horsepower to compete with AMD’s much pricier Ryzen 9 processors in all areas, including gaming. For upending the desktop chip pricing bracket, the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus earns our Editors' Choice award for elite performance.
Design: Powerful and Priced To Sell
It's no overstatement to say this chip will dramatically reshape the consumer desktop processor market. That may sound bold, given that the processor is still Arrow Lake at its core, but it's true. Intel's hardware changes help the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus to compete. Before discussing those improvements, though, let's dig into this chip's exceptional $299 price and what you get for it.
With eight Performance cores and 16 Efficient cores, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus has the same core configuration and performance potential as Intel’s Core Ultra 9 processors, like the Core Ultra 9 285K. The Ultra 7 270K Plus has a slightly slower turbo clock speed than the Ultra 9 285K, but it delivers performance gains in other areas. The price difference between the two is huge, too: The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus costs just $299, compared with the Ultra 9 285K, which launched at $589—nearly double!
Intel will continue selling last year's Core Ultra 9 processors, but unless you see massive price cuts, you shouldn't bother with them. Don't spend $589 on one when you can buy a near-identical chip with similar or potentially faster performance for close to half the price. This massive price shift will unquestionably reshape the processor market. This positioning changes the economics of high-end processors, regardless of whether AMD makes its own price cuts, which is likely.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)Intel’s existing non-Plus Core Ultra 7 200S processors will likewise need a price cut to remain relevant, just like the Ultra 9. Also, don’t hold your breath for a Core Ultra 9 200S Plus chip—it's not coming. Intel said as much, and it makes sense: An Ultra 9 200S Plus would probably need additional cores to stand out from the Ultra 7 270K Plus, and I suspect that is impossible without a significant redesign of the Arrow Lake package. That kind of change might also require a new socket to support it, whereas these new Core Ultra 200S Plus processors will work with existing Intel socket LGA 1851 motherboards. Intel didn't say you will need a BIOS update to make these new Plus chips work on existing boards, and our test samples booted to Windows just fine without one. But it is always best to update the BIOS to the latest version, anyway, to ensure the best performance and security."
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)Intel Core Ultra 200S Plus Explained: What Makes These Refreshed Arrow Lake Chips Different?
I'll discuss how AMD stacks up in the benchmarks, but first, here's how the Core Ultra 200S Plus chips stand out from their predecessors.
Intel claims to have made several small changes to its Arrow Lake design to create the new Core Ultra 200S Plus line. The company won't detail what exactly all of these are, but it highlighted two major improvements.
The processor’s internal data connections were Intel's first focus. Multiple smaller chips, known as chiplets (also sometimes more generically referred to as "dies"), comprise Arrow Lake processors. A downside to chiplets is that all of this siloed hardware needs to cross-communicate, and how fast data can move between dies significantly affects performance. To boost speed, Intel raised the clock speed of these die-to-die interconnects from 2.1GHz to 3GHz, enabling higher bandwidth.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)Intel sped up other components on the processor, including the fabric interconnect infrastructure containing the system-on-chip tile and other connectivity hardware, from 2.6GHz to 3GHz. The chip's memory controller now officially supports DDR5 RAM clocked at 7,200MHz. All of these improvements boost bandwidth across the processor and reduce latency, raising performance. These increases are likely to have a noticeable impact on certain applications: Games, for instance, are often highly sensitive to such changes.
The Blue Team's other major update is the Intel Binary Optimization Tool, or iBot for short. We haven't seen a tool like this on desktop processors before. This feature allows the chip to examine the software code it receives and attempt to run it using more optimized instructions for speed and efficiency. Intel describes this as similar to how graphics cards work with driver updates, targeting specific games with hardware optimizations.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)Intel wants iBot to do the same thing for software that developers may have optimized for different platforms, like AMD, Apple, or Arm PC hardware. The company says that iBot will receive driver updates moving forward to expand the software that it supports. For now, these are the only games and apps that iBot supports:
- Assassin’s Creed Mirage
- Borderlands 3
- Cyberpunk 2077
- FarCry 6
- Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail
- Hitman 3
- Hogwarts Legacy
- Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered
- Naraka: Bladepoint
- Remnant II
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Tiny Tina’s Wonderland
- Geekbench 6.3 or newer (a proof-of-concept release)
Test Setup and Competition
My test bed for Arrow Lake processors, like the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K, features an ASRock Z890 Taichi motherboard with 32GB of DDR5 RAM in a dual-channel configuration, set to operate at the processor’s max official memory speed. A Corsair iCue Link Titan 360 RX LCD liquid CPU cooler actively cools the processor, and the system has a 1TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD with Windows 11 installed. To ensure plenty of power, I use SilverStone’s Hela 1650R 1,650-watt power supply. Finally, I also use an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 in the system for all tests except for those focused on testing the CPU’s integrated graphics processor (IGP).
This chip genuinely competes with almost every processor north of $200. I’ve already covered how the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus essentially replaces all Core Ultra 9 processors, which means it competes directly with the Ultra 9 285K's former enemies, like the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X. The Ultra 7 270K Plus is also the fastest in its class, surpassing its predecessors and positioning it to compete with all of AMD’s Ryzen 7 chips, such as the Ryzen 7 9700X, Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and Ryzen 7 9850X3D.
Price-wise, the Ultra 7 270K undercuts all of them, landing closest to AMD’s $279 Ryzen 5 9600X. The Ultra 7 270K’s $299 price puts it in the typical desktop-CPU midrange, but with high-end specs. Just think carefully before buying any other chip priced between $200 and $300. If you can save up the difference for the Ultra 7 270K Plus, it will likely serve you better.
Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus: Processor Tests
Our Cinebench 2024 test results show that the Ultra 7 270K Plus performed nearly identically to the Ultra 9 285K—unsurprising given their similar specs. These results also revealed Intel's latest top-end chip outrunning all of AMD’s desktop AM5 processors, including the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9950X. Intel’s lead here wasn't huge (it's practically tied with the 9950X3D in the multicore Cinebench test, and was edged out by the 9850X3D by a point in the single-core test), but it is impressive given the price: less than half of what AMD asks for, say, the $649 Ryzen 9 9950X.
Intel's Arrow Lake processors have lagged behind AMD's Ryzen 9 processors in the Blender Benchmark, which we set here to test just the CPU, not the graphics card. The results here were again too close to the Ultra 9 chip's numbers to show measurable improvement. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9950X maintained their small but clear lead over the competition. Lower-end processors in both camps, like the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and Core Ultra 7 265K, lagged far behind the Ultra 7 270K Plus here. Again, though: That $299 price!
HandBrake was the first test to show the Ultra 9 285K as clearly faster than the Ultra 7 270K Plus, with the former holding a roughly 4% performance advantage. The Ultra 7 270K Plus also slotted directly between the two Ryzen 9 competitors. This result is still a win for the Ultra 7 270K Plus: The Ultra 9 285K may be 4% faster, but its list price is 97% higher. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D was about 4% faster than the refreshed Arrow Lake and costs 134% more, at $699. There's no reality in which this meager advantage is worth the price hike.
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The Ultra 9 285K was again a little faster than the Ultra 7 270K Plus in POV-Ray 3.7, but not nearly enough to offset the price difference. None of the AMD competition was competitive against the Ultra 7 270K Plus in this benchmark.
Our last CPU-focused test measures Adobe’s Photoshop and Premiere Pro performance using the PugetBench for Creators utility. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus was significantly faster than the Ultra 9 285K here and competitive with the Ryzen 9 chips in both apps. However, the Adobe Creative Suite results I’ve gathered from Arrow Lake processors have not been particularly consistent, relatively speaking. While this chip looks like a content-creation ace, take these results with a grain of salt.
Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus: Gaming Tests, Low Settings
Arrow Lake's biggest weakness was, unquestionably, gaming. You certainly can run modern PC games on original Arrow Lake processors, but their overall gaming performance lags behind the competition, especially at low graphics settings and lower resolutions. (People who play high-speed twitch-action games, like first-person shooters, use this approach to maximize frame rates.) This new Core Ultra 200S Plus line addresses that discrepancy directly.
In Cyberpunk 2077, you'll see instant signs of improvement. Intel touts a geomean average performance increase of 15% in games for the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, and the chip produced nearly 14% more frames per second than the Ultra 9 285K at 1080p and 1440p resolution in this game. The improvement was smaller at 4K, but the Ultra 7 270K Plus outpaced the Ryzen 9 9950X at all three resolutions. The Ultra 7 270K Plus couldn't keep up with AMD’s Ryzen chips with 3D V-Cache (the ones ending with "X3D") in this game, but it came closer than any previous Arrow Lake processor in its class.
Intel says this 15% overall increase comes from all of its Core Ultra 200S Plus series improvements, including iBot, the increased die-to-die data transfer speed, and the raised memory speed. This is only true for games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, however, as iBot doesn't support the other games we test. Any performance gains in those unsupported titles, like F1 2024, are likely due to Intel's other two primary upgrades.
We can see a similar yet less favorable outcome for the Ultra 7 270K Plus in F1 2024. Intel’s performance improvement over older Arrow Lake processors is clear and tangible, but AMD’s chips remained firmly in the lead, and by wider margins this time. The Ultra 7 270K Plus nearly caught up with the Ryzen 9 9950X here, but Intel's tweaks just weren’t quite enough.
The Black Myth: Wukong results show the Ultra 7 270K Plus pushing to challenge AMD’s 3D V-Cache processors at 1080p, so kudos for that. However, the subsequent 1440p results showed the X3D competition to be much faster (though the 9850X3D stumbled a bit). Gains here over the Ultra 9 285K were also less pronounced, with the Ultra 7 270K Plus clocking in slightly faster at 1080p and the Ultra 9 285K gaining an edge at 1440p.
The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus was clearly ahead of the Ultra 9 285K and the Ryzen 9 9950X again in Total War: Three Kingdoms. The Ultra 7 270K Plus also beat the Ultra 9 285K in Shadow of the Tomb Raider while coming close to the Ryzen 9 9950X. All of the X3D processors were significantly ahead in both games.
Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus: Gaming Tests, High Settings
Intel's Core Ultra 7 270K Plus showed noticeable gains over the older Arrow Lake processors while running games with low graphics settings, making it a more competitive option against the Ryzen 9 9950X. However, AMD’s chips with 3D V-Cache were still significantly faster overall (with some edge cases). Cranking the game settings to the max, how I prefer to play, produced somewhat different results.
Starting with 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, the 270K Plus posted the fastest CPU subscore of any desktop processor we’ve tested to date, if by a small margin. This result does not fully reflect real-world gaming performance, however, and Cyberpunk again showed the three X3D chips here in the lead at 1080p. Interestingly, the Ultra 7 270K Plus outran the Ryzen 9 9950X at 1080p and, to a smaller degree, at 1440p. It also tied with the 9950X3D at 1440p and 4K resolutions.
F1 2024 remains a difficult benchmark for Intel’s Arrow Lake processors at lower resolutions, with significant daylight between them and AMD’s Ryzen 9000-series chips. At 4K, that advantage began to erode as the GPU became a greater bottleneck, but AMD's advantage at 1440p and 1080p remains quite large.
Last, with Black Myth: Wukong, the AMD competition held a small lead at 1440p over the Ultra 7 270K Plus, but the AMD chips essentially tied the Intel part at 1080p and 4K. DLSS likely contributed to this tie, suggesting that, in this particular game, you won't see much difference among these high-end CPUs.
Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus: Integrated Graphics Tests
The integrated graphics processor (IGP) inside the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is unchanged from the preceding Arrow Lake processors. It utilizes the Intel Xe LPG architecture, comprising four Xe cores and a total of 64 Matrix Engines for neural-assisted graphics rendering. The IGP also includes 512 pixel shaders clocked at 2GHz.
While AMD sells a few processors with more powerful IGPs, the IGP in most of its chips is substantially slower than Intel's Arrow Lake IGP. The 270K Plus pulled slightly ahead of the other Arrow Lake processors here, likely thanks to its support for faster DDR5 RAM.
Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus: Power and Thermal Tests
I use a Kill-A-Watt wall meter to measure the power draw of each test system to get an idea of how much power each processor consumes. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus was generally more power hungry than other Arrow Lake processors I've tested, but still far more efficient than the older Intel Core i9-14900K. AMD’s competing chips were generally less power hungry overall, with some exceptions, but the numbers are relatively close when comparing the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus to the Ryzen 9 competition.
The Ultra 7 270K Plus's operating temperature was also slightly higher than every Arrow Lake processor and the AMD competition (with some edge cases), but again, it was worlds better than the Core i9-14900K.
Intel does not provide a stock cooler with the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, but our own internal testing showed it reaching 86 degrees C under peak turbo power (250 watts) while cooled by a 360mm water cooler. You likely could get by with a less robust thermal solution, but you should stick to either a liquid cooling solution or a large, robust air cooler. Smaller air coolers are likely to struggle to keep up.