Intel - Core Ultra 200S | Review Thread

Draugoth

Gold Member
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Pros:
  • Excellent performance in heavy multithreaded apps
  • Good energy efficiency
  • Easy to keep cool
  • PCIe Gen 5 SSD without compromising GPU bandwidth
  • Overclocking unlocked
  • Good memory support, well over DDR5-8000
  • Integrated GPU
  • iGPU performance doubled vs Raptor Lake
  • Support for Thunderbolt 4 & 5, Wi-Fi 6E
  • NPU included
  • 3 nanometer production process
Cons:
  • Gaming performance lower than expected, slower than Raptor Lake
  • Some games and applications aren't currently performing well at all
  • Requires new motherboard with Socket LGA1851
  • No more support for DDR4 memory
  • No support for AVX-512
Blog Reviews

Toms Hardware:
Intel's Core Ultra 9 285K makes strong gains in productivity workloads, but it struggles to match its prior-gen counterpart in gaming performance. That leaves AMD's competing chips as a better value for gaming, while low pricing on the previous-gen Core i9-14900K will provide competition from within Intel's own lineup.
TechRadar:
I had high hopes for Arrow Lake, and of the two current-gen processor lines, it beats out archrival AMD's Ryzen 9000 series, which is a positive. However, the new Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and Intel Core Ultra 5 245K really aren't any better than the chips they are replacing, and their efficiency gains are too modest to justify investing in a whole new platform




Video Reviews



 
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According to Intel, just like Zen 5 for AMD, this is a new design for them that they will iterate/build upon for future 300, 400 series Intel cores. For gaming, it looks like a flop... However, the power efficiency compared to Intel's 14th gen does look good.
 
14-FHD-Watts.png

Gaming power consumption isn't horrible at least.

Still a really boring and disappointing release from a gaming perspective though. No idea why you'd buy this if you were building a gaming system.
 
14-FHD-Watts.png

Gaming power consumption isn't horrible at least.

Still a really boring and disappointing release from a gaming perspective though. No idea why you'd buy this if you were building a gaming system.
That's probably not right. There's no way the 265K would consume more power while gaming than the 285K (or be around the same). It doesn't make sense.

Edit: 130W for the 14900K? :messenger_tears_of_joy:
 
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That's probably not right. There's no way the 265K would consume more power while gaming than the 285K (or be around the same). It doesn't make sense.

Edit: 130W for the 14900K? :messenger_tears_of_joy:
Assuming that this benchmark is not deliberately testing the load of the CPU while gaming, this is most likely accurate for normal gaming purposes.

People don't seem to realize this, but when you aren't deliberately trying to stress the CPU by minimizing load on the GPU, CPUs largely don't matter at the higher end for gaming unless you have an incredibly powerful GPU like a 4090. You really aren't CPU-bound in most games when playing at normal settings at 1440p or higher, you're almost always going to be sitting at like 99% GPU utilization with an unlocked framerate with the CPU just sort of hovering at anywhere from 10%-40% depending on how demanding the game is, so you're barely pushing any power limits on the CPU.
Believe it or not, Alder Lake (and Raptor Lake/desktop MTL) is actually a fairly efficient platform until you push it to its limits, THEN it becomes a literal fire hazard in terms of thermals and power draw. Most people don't understand this and just think buying Intel is just buying a space heater. I know from my own experience just gaming, my 13700k never goes over like 130w at most. Only when I compile shaders or use something like RPCS3 so I see it go over 200w.
AMD is still more efficient, but Intel is only really bad with efficiency at the top end.
 
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Assuming that this benchmark is not deliberately testing the load of the CPU while gaming, this is most likely accurate for normal gaming purposes.

People don't seem to realize this, but when you aren't deliberately trying to stress the CPU by minimizing load on the GPU, CPUs largely don't matter at the higher end for gaming unless you have an incredibly powerful GPU like a 4090. You really aren't CPU-bound in most games when playing at normal settings at 1440p or higher, you're almost always going to be sitting at like 99% GPU utilization with an unlocked framerate with the CPU just sort of hovering at anywhere from 10%-40% depending on how demanding the game is, so you're barely pushing any power limits on the CPU.
Believe it or not, Alder Lake (and Raptor Lake/desktop MTL) is actually a fairly efficient platform until you push it to its limits, THEN it becomes a literal fire hazard in terms of thermals and power draw. Most people don't understand this and just think buying Intel is just buying a space heater. I know from my own experience just gaming, my 13700k never goes over like 130w at most. Only when I compile shaders or use something like RPCS3 so I see it go over 200w.
AMD is still more efficient, but Intel is only really bad with efficiency at the top end.

That is true, but then CPUs are stressed with shader compilation. A lot.
Also, during loading a few threads are stressed as well for decompression, especially using oodle.
That's one way people found their Intel cpu had degraded.
 
I don't what to say other than I'm shocked that 5800x3d is sometimes the second best CPU, it boggles my mind that 2017 platform can still produce such results:

YjYAGu2.jpeg
3PTxDYT.jpeg
hcy4ll0.jpeg
kDOGosY.jpeg
P1T5M5n.jpeg
I28eOKW.jpeg
 
I don't what to say other than I'm shocked that 5800x3d is sometimes the second best CPU, it boggles my mind that 2017 platform can still produce such results:

YjYAGu2.jpeg
3PTxDYT.jpeg
hcy4ll0.jpeg
kDOGosY.jpeg
P1T5M5n.jpeg
I28eOKW.jpeg

With DDR4 memory as well.

Absolute monster of a CPU. I still have it paired with my 4090 and don't feel the need to make any changes to that setup. Rock solid platform.
 
Seeing the reviews this is a very sad chip for gaming, hopefully this is a great starting point for the new architecture.
If gaming don't touch this Ultra Series. Better luck next time intel.
 
Seeing the reviews this is a very sad chip for gaming, hopefully this is a great starting point for the new architecture.
If gaming don't touch this Ultra Series. Better luck next time intel.

That's true and I hope they will deliver but at the same time they really needed this launch to be good and they fucked up...

Intel isn't in a very good position right now.
 
That's true and I hope they will deliver but at the same time they really needed this launch to be good and they fucked up...

Intel isn't in a very good position right now.

It's not just that Intel released a bad CPU.
The worst part is that they are paying TSMC for most of the tiles. Meanwhile, Intel's fabs are losing them money, while not producing new CPUs.
 
But don't worry, Intel is getting 8.5B from tax payer money, soon enough.
Though tax payers won't even get a discount if they buy an Intel CPU.

Hahaha.

I think price is the worst thing about these CPUs, who will pay full price for 285k with this kind of performance?

With reasonable prices they wouldn't be bad.

Edit:

Looks like Leonidas Leonidas has been busy as well:

IfFEhnz.jpeg

Fuck me, I was wrong...
 
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I keep trying to justifying Arrow Lake in my mind but FF14, Borderlands 3, etc... the games that I play do so much worse on Arrow Lake. Especially for the given price of the cpu and mobo, it's time for me to return to AMD I guess.
 
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I just checked Amazon's top selling CPUs, and there isn't one 200s in there.
Just AMD and Intel's Raptor and Alder lake.
makes me wonder if most stores still don't have stock
Or maybe that's just a soft launch, with very limited stock. It happened before. A few processors for few stores just to say that it arrived.
 
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Intel doesn't want to cater to gamers. That's fine I'll take my money elsewhere.
I don't think it's that they don't want to.. they just made some really bad choices and now they will have a period of a few years where they need to work really hard to right the ship. Hope they can get it together since we don't want another nvidia situation.
 
I don't what to say other than I'm shocked that 5800x3d is sometimes the second best CPU, it boggles my mind that 2017 platform can still produce such results:

YjYAGu2.jpeg
3PTxDYT.jpeg
hcy4ll0.jpeg
kDOGosY.jpeg
P1T5M5n.jpeg
I28eOKW.jpeg
That's what happens when you're in 3D, other CPU's are in 2D and just can't compete when you have a whole extra dimension to work with!
 
All of these reviews are inconclusive. There are too many bugs and Windows just seems to be shit right now.

It remains to be seen what sort of gains can be had once better optimized. One thing is obvious is that AMD and Intel need to light a fire under Microsoft.

I've seen some reviews calling this Intels "Zen 1 moment"….um yeah.

Maybe that is true, but Zen 1 was priced so damn well that it made it hard to ignore despite being mostly uncompetitive performance wise. Arrow Lake isn't remotely close to being to being priced well enough to ignore.

I cannot see anyone who is on an AMD platform would even remotely consider Intel unless it's strictly about productivity. I'd also like to see benchmarks on this final microcode update that Intel claims fixes Raptor Lake.
 
These chips are in a bad spot. In any type of performance/power/cost ratio matrix they look really poor regardless of what you look at.
 
Man, Intel in 2024 is looking a lot like AMD circa 2008.

Now all we need is a true believer to say "hey guys, sure Core Ultra N might be slightly behind, but just wait til Core Ultra N+1, it's gonna be a real beast if these rumors are true!!!"
 
All of these reviews are inconclusive. There are too many bugs and Windows just seems to be shit right now.

It remains to be seen what sort of gains can be had once better optimized. One thing is obvious is that AMD and Intel need to light a fire under Microsoft.

I've seen some reviews calling this Intels "Zen 1 moment"….um yeah.

Maybe that is true, but Zen 1 was priced so damn well that it made it hard to ignore despite being mostly uncompetitive performance wise. Arrow Lake isn't remotely close to being to being priced well enough to ignore.

I cannot see anyone who is on an AMD platform would even remotely consider Intel unless it's strictly about productivity. I'd also like to see benchmarks on this final microcode update that Intel claims fixes Raptor Lake.

Part of the problems seem to be related to the power profile. So maybe Intel can fix that with a new chipset driver that ads something better customized for the 200 series.
There also seem to be issues with the scheduling of Windows. Again. So Microsoft is to blame here. Again.
But the main reason seems to be a much higher memory latency. There are several games, that are sensitive to latency, where the 285K performs terrible.
Maybe tweaking the memory can shave a few ns, as usual. But it might require a new generation and a new design to bring that latency down, to more acceptable levels.
 
Man, Intel in 2024 is looking a lot like AMD circa 2008.

Now all we need is a true believer to say "hey guys, sure Core Ultra N might be slightly behind, but just wait til Core Ultra N+1, it's gonna be a real beast if these rumors are true!!!"
The real kicker is Intel not even confirming that Core Ultra N + 1 will be on the same socket or not, leading us to believe this is a one and done platform.
 
I'm more optimistic for Intel than in previous generations. This could be their Zen 1. Newer iterations will improve things and they will be competitive again, I think.

Also, with the right price, that could be an acceptable product. Everyone who wants to stay with Intel just need to wait for the discounts to buy one, or maybe stay with their current bomba for another gen, given that the power consumption and heat didn't bother, and that the processor don't die for the period.
 
Intel will need to put in a lot of work over next few years. Hopefully at least productivity performance is better vs gaming.

That aside, I am soooo tired of Microsoft's bullshit and incompetency around Windows launches and updates. It's like every yearly release we have to guess what is going to be broken now.

And of course them shoving ads, privacy issues and the stupid AI dependencies in underlying OS is beyond frustrating.
 
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