Pros & Cons
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- Highly competitive pricing for an 18-core CPU
- Exceptional productivity performance for the money
- Improved gaming speeds over original "Arrow Lake" when used with a discrete graphics card
- Potent integrated graphics
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- Gaming performance still lags the competition
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus Specs
| Base Clock Frequency | 4.2 |
| Bundled Cooler | None |
| Core Count | 18 |
| Integrated Graphics | Intel Xe LPG |
| Integrated Graphics Base Clock | 1900 |
| L3 Cache Amount | 30 |
| Lithography | 3 |
| Maximum Boost Clock | 5.3 |
| Socket Compatibility | Intel LGA1851 |
| Thermal Design Power (TDP) Rating | 159 |
| Thread Count | 18 |
| Unlocked Multiplier? |
Intel’s new $199 Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is the company’s best mid-tier desktop processor, and not just because it's the latest one. This chip changes the entire budget CPU discussion. Thanks to this refreshed Arrow Lake part's tantalizingly low price, any competing chips at or near this price are in danger of irrelevance. Intel focused on boosting the processor's gaming performance to better compete with AMD's superior 3D V-Cache chips. (It's still not close, but the part shows impressive gains over its predecessors.) While the Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus isn’t the fastest gaming or productivity CPU you can buy, it's one heck of a value. We crown it the new king of affordable chips for work and play, and it earns our Editors' Choice award for mainstream processors.
Design: Rewriting the Rules for Budget CPUs
While Intel’s hardware enhancements in the 200S Plus chips are undeniably exciting, it's really all about these rock-bottom prices. At $199, the Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus will be hard for AMD to counter without significant price cuts. This chip will also displace many older Intel CPUs that sell for around this price.
It will also work with existing LGA1851-socketed motherboards, making it an alluring upgrade option for lower-end Arrow Lake systems. Our test board did not require a BIOS update to work with the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, but it is always a good idea to update your BIOS to the latest version to ensure the best performance, security, and compatibility.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)For this aggressive price, the Ultra 5 250K Plus comes equipped with six of Intel's Performance cores and 12 Efficient cores. That's four more E-cores over the now-aged Intel Core Ultra 5 245K, which launched for $309 at the end of 2024. The Ultra 5 250K Plus also has 6MB more L3 cache and a slightly faster boost clock speed, upped by 100MHz.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)These additional resources bring the Ultra 5 250K Plus closer to the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K, which also has a dozen efficiency cores. The Ultra 7 265K should still beat out the Ultra 5 250K Plus, with its eight P-cores to the six in the refreshed midrange Arrow Lake part, but this new chip has more tricks than just bumping up the resource counts.
Intel made several changes in this generation that are mostly geared toward gaming improvements. Intel’s Arrow Lake processors have lagged behind AMD here, namely due to its 3D V-Cache technology. These "X3D" chips leverage outsized amounts of L3 cache to keep more data flowing and boost gaming performance.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)In response, Intel sped up the internal data connections of this generation's chips. The die-to-die interconnect tying together the smaller chiplets comprising an Arrow Lake CPU has jumped from 2.1GHz to 3GHz. Intel also upped this CPU's memory controller to support DDR5 at 7,200MHz, up from 6,400MHz on the Ultra 5 245K. While not massive stores of L3 cache, these memory-bandwidth-related changes are clearly helpful, as you'll soon see.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)Intel’s new Intel Binary Optimization Tool, or “iBot,” is arguably more important. This tool improves efficiency and performance by analyzing the code the chip receives and running that code with more optimized instructions. To benefit from this feature, a program needs to directly support it via driver updates, which Intel intends to release regularly.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)For now, the only apps I tested that support this feature are Cyberpunk 2077 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. For a deeper dive on these improvements and how they work, check out my Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review.
Test Setup and Competition
My test bed for Arrow Lake processors 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 use an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 in the system for all tests except those focused on the CPU’s integrated graphics processor (IGP).
At $199, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus will lord over the budget chip market with little competition. The AMD Ryzen 5 9600X costs $279, as low as AMD goes for general consumers in its most recent series, Ryzen 9000. AMD leans on older processors in the Ryzen 7000- and 5000-series to cover price points below this, but they can't stand up to this newer Ultra 5 250K Plus. Intel's own aged Core i5-14400 and the Core Ultra 5 225 compete on price, but neither has the raw horsepower to keep up with the new Ultra 5 250K Plus.
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus: Processor Tests
The Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, with its high core count, performed faster in the multi-threaded Cinebench 2024 test than many competing processors. The 250K Plus outpaced the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and Ryzen 7 9800X3D here by roughly 35% and 53%, respectively, in the multi-threaded test, and both cost close to double what this chip retails for. The 9850X3D led the Intel part in the single-threaded test by a negligible amount.
The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus was also substantially faster than the Ryzen 7 X3D chips in Blender, HandBrake, and POV-Ray 3.7. As for our Adobe content creation tests, the Ultra 5 250K Plus was clearly faster in Premiere Pro, while the Ryzen 7 CPUs were quicker in Adobe Photoshop. Take these results with some salt, however, as what I've gathered from Arrow Lake processors on this specific test has been inconsistent.
I didn’t have time to retest the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X for this review. However, judging from how these X3D chips fared, it would undoubtedly have been even further behind Intel's new midrange marvel in all of these tests. The Ultra 5 245K likewise lagged a fair way behind the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus in many tests due to its lower core count.
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus: Gaming Tests, Low Settings
Intel’s Core i5 processors dominated PC gaming for years, and the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus showed signs of a comeback here, at least among Intel CPUs. This chip outpaced every other Intel CPU at 1080p and 1440p in Cyberpunk 2077, likely thanks in part to the iBot feature. At 4K resolution, the 250K Plus fell behind but remained close to the higher-end competition. The 250K Plus also outpaced the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X at 1080p and 1440p.
F1 2024 doesn’t support the iBot feature yet, but you can still see some performance gains, as the Ultra 5 250K Plus outpaced the Ultra 7 265K. AMD’s X3D processors performed far better in this game, showing off their massive cache advantage.
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The 250K Plus’ Black Myth: Wukong speeds showed a steeper relative decline in frames as resolutions increased than every Intel chip tested, save for the Core i5-14400. While it was generally competitive with even the high-end CPUs at 1080p, matching the Ryzen 9 9950X, the 250K Plus trailed everything else but that 14th Gen chip at 1440p. At 4K resolution, the 250K Plus just couldn't find a win, even lagging the Core i5-14400.
Intel's new midrange part once again beat the Ryzen 9 9950X and the Core Ultra 7 265K in Total War: Three Kingdoms. The 250K Plus also outpaced the Ultra 7 265K in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and it traded blows with the 9950X in this game.
These results clearly show that Intel improved the Ultra 5 250K Plus’s gaming performance compared with its processors, particularly at 1080p and 1440p. While AMD’s X3D chips are undoubtedly faster than the 250K Plus at running games with low graphics settings for maximum frame rates, that's what AMD built them for.
The Core Ultra 5 250K's performance advantage over the older Core Ultra 5 245K in games is most evident in tests with low graphics settings. The higher frame rates achieved under these conditions make the difference more noticeable, as the GPU is less of a bottleneck and the CPU becomes more of one. At higher resolutions, the two processors tend to perform similarly. But at 1080p, the Ultra 5 250K pulls ahead by a small but noticeable margin.
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus: Gaming Tests, High Settings
If you run games with high graphics settings, like me, you'll see a somewhat different picture of the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus' gaming prowess. In 3DMark, the Ultra 5 250K Plus performed better than AMD’s Ryzen 7 9850X3D and Ryzen 7 9800X3D in both measurements. Still, synthetic simulation results like these are better viewed as a baseline for comparisons, rather than 1:1 reflective of actual gaming performance.
Returning to Cyberpunk 2077 with the Ray-Tracing Ultra graphics preset, the Ultra 5 250K Plus was again the fastest gaming CPU among the Intel processors at 1080p, also beating the Ryzen 9 9950X. At 1440p and 4K, the chip generally remained competitive with the rest of the Intel pack, even nipping at the heels of the X3D chips.
Cranking up the graphics settings helped the Ultra 5 250K Plus better compete in F1 2024, relatively speaking. It was still clearly behind AMD here, but the performance delta between the two brands was much smaller. As for Black Myth: Wukong, DLSS likely contributed to this condensing of scores across resolutions. In this particular game, and with an RTX 5090, your CPU matters a lot less.
The key takeaway is that, while the Ultra 5 250K Plus wasn't as fast as AMD’s X3D CPUs, it wasn't all that much slower in many tests at higher graphics settings. If you prefer low graphics settings and resolutions for maximum frame rates in competitive games, then just buy an X3D chip for your specific needs. However, with high graphics settings, the AMD X3D advantage shrinks considerably. Also, remember that this performance gap will shrink further when using any graphics card slower than an RTX 5090.
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus: Integrated Graphics Tests
Intel pairs its Arrow Lake processors with a highly capable IGP based on the company’s Xe LPG graphics architecture. It consists of four Xe cores with a total of 64 Matrix Engines for neural-assisted graphics rendering. The IGP also contains 512 pixel shaders clocked at 1.9GHz.
This IGP is sufficient to run a wide range of games, particularly games from a couple of years ago. Both Total War: Three Kingdoms and Shadow of the Tomb Raider were playable at 1080p, and all the Arrow Lake parts clearly outpaced the IGP that AMD provides inside of most of its desktop processors.
With results like these, the Arrow Lake processors are highly recommendable for casual or retro gaming systems. Also, good to know: If you don’t intend to use the IGP, a 250KF Plus is on the way, which won’t have an IGP, likely for less cash. (No pricing was available on that model yet.)
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K 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 5 250K Plus draws less power than most of the Arrow Lake chips I've tested, due to its 159-watt rating versus the Core Ultra 7 and Core Ultra 9 models' 250W.
This lower relative power draw helped the Ultra 5 250K Plus’ power consumption to land in the same ballpark as the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and 9800X3D. That's impressive given how much faster the 250K Plus is in some areas.
The Ultra 5 250K Plus also stayed relatively cool throughout the testing period, and it didn’t get quite as hot as most of the other competing options. That's another testament to the chip's efficiency, given its competitive performance. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is more power-hungry than the Core Ultra 5 245K, but that's as expected, given the Ultra 5 250K Plus' increased core count. The 250K Plus reached a max temperature of 76 degrees C while being cooled by the 360mm Corsair liquid cooler I installed in the system.
While that isn't a blazingly hot peak for a CPU, I'd stick to a large air cooler or a liquid CPU cooler if you buy a 250K Plus. The processor does not come with a bundled stock cooler, and while a small air cooler might still work, you will be running the chip at higher temps far more often. I likely wouldn't use anything less than a 120mm liquid cooler, and I'd only go that route so I can fit it into a Mini-ITX PC case.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus
Intel's Core Ultra 5 250K Plus boosts gaming performance over its "Arrow Lake" predecessor at a price that's hard to pass up. It's not the fastest gaming CPU around, but no other chip goes as hard for so little money.