In every processor line, a special model or two often stands out and garners the most attention. (Recent examples? Take Intel's value-monster Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, or AMD's gamer-fave Ryzen 9 9950X3D.) The other CPUs in the family that surround these star children are typically variants that target different price points and performance needs.

The Intel Core Ultra 5 225 is one of these lesser chips. It exists near the bottom of Intel’s desktop "Arrow Lake" processor lineup. It's one of the most affordable processors on the platform, with an Intel "recommended customer price" of $188 to $236, and a current street price around $189 from several retailers at the time of this writing. While it's cut back, from a spec point of view, versus the rest of the Arrow Lake LGA 1851 family, the Ultra 5 225 retains some appeal for those looking for an affordable, no-thrills processor. Just make sure you are paying far less than what an Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, our Editors' Choice champion among cheap chips, will cost you. (It works on the same platform.)

Chip Design and Specs: Intel's Bluntest Arrow

You can split Intel’s Arrow Lake desktop processors into four broad groups, based on the resources they include.

At the top of the line, you have the Core Ultra 9 200K-class chips, such as Intel's Core Ultra 9 285K, packed with eight Performance cores (P-cores) and 16 Efficient cores (E-cores). The core counts slowly diminish in each of the other tiers, in descending order: The second group, the Core Ultra 7 200K-class line headed by the Core Ultra 7 265K, also has eight P-cores, but with a few E-cores inactive, leaving 12 available for service.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

After that, we move on to the third group: the Core Ultra 5 200K-class models, such as the Intel Core Ultra 5 245K, which ships with six P-cores and eight E-cores. And beneath those are the fourth group, another group of lesser Core Ultra 5 processors that retain the six P-cores but cut the E-core count to just four.

The Ultra 5 225 is the second-best chip in this bottom group, beneath the Core Ultra 5 235, with specs that are clearly budget-oriented. The E-cores give the 225 a higher overall core count than CPUs like AMD's Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 5 8500G, while maintaining core-count parity with last-generation Intel Core i5 processors, such as the Intel Core i5-14400.

Worth noting, though: These other processors support Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT), which increases their addressable thread count and can give them an advantage over the Core Ultra 5 225 in some situations. Both of the Ryzen 5 processors mentioned above can crunch on up to 12 concurrent threads. The previous-generation Core i5-14400, likewise, supports Hyper-Threading (Intel's version of SMT) on its P-cores, which ups its total thread count to 16. Intel doesn't employ Hyper-Threading on any of its Arrow Lake processors, however, which means the 225 is limited to just one thread per CPU core, for a total of 10.

The Ultra 5 225’s clock speed tops out at 4.9GHz, slower than some competing solutions, such as the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X, which maxes out at 5.4GHz. Conversely, the Ultra 5's DDR5 memory controller holds its own against higher-end Intel Arrow Lake processors and outpaces AMD competitors here, supporting DDR5 RAM as fast as 6,400MHz.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

For graphics, the Core Ultra 5 225 carries a cut-down integrated graphics processor (dubbed simply "Intel Graphics," or "Intel Xe LPG") compared with the rest of the Arrow Lake family. With just two Intel Alchemist Xe cores available—half as many as on the higher-end Ultra 5 245K, Ultra 7 265K, and Ultra 9 285K—the Intel Graphics on the 225 has a pixel shader count capped at 256, plus 16 texture mapping units (TMUs), eight raster operation processors (ROPs), and two ray-tracing units.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

These reductions make the Ultra 5 225’s integrated graphics processor (IGP) a lot weaker than what you get with its Arrow Lake siblings. However, it should still match or beat the best integrated graphics found on Intel's older "Raptor Lake Refresh" (14th Gen Core) models. The top-tier chips of this class, like the Intel Core i9-14900K, have the same number of shaders, TMUs, and ROPs, but no ray-tracing accelerators—which could give the Ultra 5 225’s IGP a minor edge.

The Ultra 5 225 also packs a neural processing unit for handling AI tasks locally, but you'll get limited benefit from it: It's rated at just 13 trillion AI operations per second (TOPS). This may sound like a lot, but it's well short of the 40 TOPS minimum required to run all of Microsoft’s Copilot AI software on-device.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

For out-of-the-box thermal management, the Ultra 5 225 comes with an Intel Laminar RM2 stock cooler. It's not a particularly large or high-end solution, but it should come in handy if you lack a better option, and it will save you a few bucks if you won't be pressing the PC too hard.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The Ultra 5 225 was designed for Intel's LGA 1851 platform (this CPU socket debuted with Arrow Lake) and is compatible with all chipsets released for that platform to date without requiring a BIOS update. It should also be compatible with most, if not all, coolers for LGA 1851 motherboards.

Test Setup and Competition

The LGA 1851 testbed I used to evaluate the Intel Core Ultra 5 225 has an ASRock Z890 Taichi motherboard and 32GB of DDR5 RAM in a dual-channel configuration, with the memory clocked at the processor’s maximum supported memory speed (6,400MHz). A Corsair iCUE Link Titan 360 RX LCD liquid CPU cooler managed the thermals for this CPU and all other tested processors. The system also has a 1TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD with Windows 11 installed, and draws power from a 1,650-watt SilverStone Hela supply. For most of the testing process, I use an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, which I remove only to run tests on the IGP. (See how we test CPUs.)

I compared the Core Ultra 5 225 with the following CPUs...

Intel Core Ultra 5 225: CPU Performance Tests

First up: Benchmarks testing raw CPU power. These tests place a heavy load on the processor, enabling us to see how much work each processor can complete while operating near 100% usage. The tests we use are largely content-creation-adjacent, as media-creation work is often heavily threaded and very demanding on the host processor. The Intel Core Ultra 5 225 performed as expected, given its price and market position.

Before comparing it with the superior Core Ultra 250K Plus, let's see how it performed on its own. In Cinebench 2024, it trailed significantly behind the high-end competition, but it noticeably outpaced its budget-priced peers from AMD and Intel. It was clearly faster than both the Ryzen 5 8500G and the Core i5-14400 in both single-threaded and multi-threaded tests.

The Intel Core Ultra 5 225 also outran the AMD Ryzen 5 8500G and Core i5-14400 in the Blender tests, but it fell significantly behind the rest of the competition. If you plan on doing a lot of work in Blender and similar core-crunching apps, you should probably consider a spicier chip.

The Ultra 5 225 performed about the same in the HandBrake test, taking 4 minutes and 30 seconds to convert a movie clip from 4K to 1080p. This result was, importantly, better than the Core i5-14400 and the Ryzen 5 8500G, but significantly slower than the higher-end processors. Realistically, this level of performance isn’t much to complain about if you just need to transcode the occasional video file from one format to another. Still, as with Blender, you’ll want a more potent CPU if you do this often.

The Core Ultra 5 225 performed slightly better in POV-Ray 3.7, finishing prominently ahead of the Ryzen 5 8500G and Core i5-14400, and only slightly behind the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The Ultra 5 225 showed faster single-threaded performance, but the 9800X3D held the lead in the multi-threaded test.

The Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere content-creation tests paralleled the other results so far: The Core Ultra 5 225 beat the Ryzen 5 8500G and Core i5-14400, but it lagged a sizable step behind the higher-end competition.

The Ultra 5 225 struggled to compete with the Ultra 5 250K Plus across all these tests. (The 250K Plus has a $199 MSRP, but is widely selling for $20 or so more.) This was expected, as the 250K Plus launched after the 225 with almost twice as many cores, among other major improvements, and at a killer price. This doesn't mean that the Ultra 5 225 is no longer worth considering. But you should pay far less for a 225 than you would for a 250K Plus. Otherwise, you're getting a raw deal.

Intel Core Ultra 5 225: Gaming Tests, Low Settings

Running PC games at low graphical settings can help you to achieve a high refresh rate. Our objective in testing with these settings can also help show the performance difference between processors and how the CPU affects peak frame rates. Typically, faster processors can support a higher overall frame rate when tested with low graphics settings and a fast enough graphics card, but this is a somewhat oversimplified view. Other factors can play into these results, such as the speed and size of the system RAM, the processor's cache, and the graphics card. As we have standardized our test systems to minimize these variables, most of the difference you see in these tests will be down to the processor's speed and architectural intricacies.

Gaming isn’t a notable strength of Intel’s Arrow Lake processors, and the Core Ultra 5 225’s results didn’t fall too far behind the Core Ultra 9 285K, the Core i9-14900K, and the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X at 4K resolutions in Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong. It was also considerably faster than the Ryzen 5 8500G and the Core i5-14400.

While the Core Ultra 5 225 placed much further behind the high-end competition (like the Core Ultra 7 265K and Ryzen 9 9950X) in F1 2024 than in Cyberpunk 2077, it still outpaced the other budget-friendly processors and posted respectable results. The Ultra 5 225 outperformed the Core i5-14400 and the Ryzen 5 8500G by wider margins in Black Myth: Wukong than in most other tested games, but it remained a fair way behind most of the higher-end competition, not to mention the 250K Plus.

In Total War: Three Kingdoms, the Ultra 5 225 struggled a bit more than in most other games. It once again topped the Core i5-14400 and Ryzen 5 8500G, but its advantage over the 8500G was significantly larger. Shadow of the Tomb Raider showed about the same results. The 250K Plus displayed better performance than any of these other budget-priced processors, making it tops among budget CPUs.

Intel Core Ultra 5 225: Gaming Tests, High Settings

Testing graphics cards with high in-game graphical settings shows how these processors perform under duress. Most in-game settings that affect image quality increase the workload on the graphics card, but some also increase the workload on the processor. The frame rate drops due to the increase in the graphical workload, but the frame rate can drop further if the processor is unable to keep up with the change in the workload, too. Testing in this configuration allows us to see how well the processors can cope.

The 3DMark Time Spy Extreme tests showed the Ultra 5 225 relatively close to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and ahead of the Ryzen 5 8500G and Core i5-14400. This doesn't sync with the real-world game results we've seen so far, where the 9800X3D was typically much faster. For example, the 9800X3D outpaced the 225 when running Cyberpunk 2077 with high graphics settings.

Outside of 4K gaming, the Ultra 5 225 lagged a visible step behind all of the high-end CPUs. Meanwhile, the 225 showed a significant lead over the Ryzen 5 8500G and a slight advantage over the Core i5-14400, but all three served up similar results at 4K.

In F1 2024, the Ultra 5 225 placed clearly behind the high-end AMD and Intel competition but performed well for its price. The Core i5-14400 was slightly slower, while the Ryzen 5 8500G was drastically so. For instance, the Ultra 5 225 ran F1 2024 at 4K almost as well as the Ryzen 5 8500G did at 1080p.

Black Myth: Wukong forces the use of screen optimization technology, and with DLSS enabled, you'll see little difference among the many tested models at the game's Cinematic graphics setting. (The Ryzen 5 8500G was clearly a bit behind the pack, though.)

The elephant in the room again, though, is the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus. The Ultra 5 225 generally lagged behind it, keeping pace only in Black Myth: Wukong.

Intel Core Ultra 5 225: Integrated Graphics Testing

With many desktop CPUs, the integrated graphics processor (IGP) goes unused and untested in favor of a discrete graphics card. The IGP can be a highly useful tool for troubleshooting issues, driving a second display, or performing some multimedia tasks. I do not test the IGP extensively, but the limited in-game testing I conduct gives us some idea of how these IGPs perform relative to each other (and, heck, to the mighty Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090).

Onward to yanking out the RTX 5090 card from the testbed, with the Core Ultra 5 225 chip now relying on its built-in graphics. In the IGP benchmarks, the Core Ultra 5 225 handily outperformed most of the AMD competition that doesn’t ship with fast IGPs, but the Ryzen 5 8500G’s Radeon 740M integrated graphics were much quicker. The two processors came closest to matching in Total War: Three Kingdoms at 1080p. Here, the Ryzen 5 8500G led the Ultra 5 225 by 9 frames per second, a significantly narrower gap than the 8500G enjoyed at 720p and in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

The Intel Core Ultra 7 265K also delivered drastically better integrated graphics performance than the Ultra 5 225. No surprise here: The two processors use the same graphics technology, but the Ultra 7 265K has twice as many Xe graphics cores and a higher graphics clock speed. The Ultra 5 225 came closest to matching CPUs like the Core i9-14900K, with the 14900K more competitive in Total War and the Ultra 5 225 slightly ahead in Tomb Raider.

Why the difference? It probably comes down to the types of games. Real-time-strategy games like Total War are more processor-intensive than others, giving the Core i9-14900K a big edge, with its outsized CPU resources. This advantage, however, dries up with the increased graphical demands of 1080p. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is less dependent on the CPU, so the Ultra 5 225's updated IGP grabs the advantage.

In general, the Ultra 5 225's IGP will do a serviceable job with older games or modern ones that aren’t graphically demanding, but AMD's Ryzen 5 8500G is the go-to chip for this particular IGP need. The 225's IGP, though, can tackle essentially any everyday graphical task short of games, and it features support for encoding and decoding a wide range of formats, including H.264, H.265, AV1, and VP9. Of course, the 250K Plus' IGP sits in another league.

Intel Core Ultra 5 225: Power Consumption and Thermal Tests

To judge each processor's power consumption, I used a Kill-A-Watt power meter while running our Blender and Cinebench tests. This gives us the full power consumption of the test system, rather than just the processors. This makes comparing numbers between AMD- and Intel-based processors in this section somewhat tricky, as the power draw of the motherboard and other components is included.

As the test systems use as many of the same parts as humanly possible, however, and because this difference in platform power consumption is unavoidable, these numbers can still be informative. These results, though, make it tricky to judge the Ultra 5 225. It used slightly less power in our Cinebench trial than the Core i5-14400 while also delivering better performance, making the Ultra 5 225 more energy efficient.

The Ryzen 5 8500G used significantly less power than either of them while under load, but it sucked up a bit more juice when idling, so you need to do some math to figure out which processor is more efficient. With Cinebench, the Ultra 5 225-based PC drew 24% more power than the 8500G one, but its performance was also 36% faster in this benchmark. Advantage: Core Ultra 5 225.

In Blender, the Ultra 5 225 system used about 22% more power than the Ryzen 5 8500G one, while performing up to 41% faster, so its efficiency, by comparison, is not cut-and-dry. Regardless, the Ultra 5 turned in superior performance in the Blender benchmark, suggesting advanced efficiency over the other budget-priced processors.

Things become clearer with thermal performance, since all of the tested processors were using the same thermal solution. The Core Ultra 5 225 beat out the Ryzen 5 8500G here, but both ran a bit hotter than the Core i5-14400.