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Intel - Core Ultra 200S | Review Thread

Draugoth

Draugoth

Gold Member
Start-Intro.jpg


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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
www.pcguide.com

There's not much in it between the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and 14900K, but I know which one I'd pick

We compare the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and i9-14900K to learn the performance difference between the two top models.
www.pcguide.com www.pcguide.com
www.theverge.com

Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K CPU is one step forward, one step back for PC gaming

Intel has favored efficiency over PC gaming performance for the Ultra 9 285K.
www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
www.igorslab.de

Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, Core Ultra 7 265K and Core Ultra 5 245K Gaming and Workstation Review - When more suddenly becomes less | igor´sLAB

The time has finally come and the results for Intel’s new Core Ultra 200 series are on the table. I can already spoil the fact that we will see very interesting, but partly mixed results today…
www.igorslab.de www.igorslab.de

Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" Delivers Strong Linux Performance Review - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com www.phoronix.com

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.
Click to expand...
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
Click to expand...




Video Reviews



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Last edited:
Md Ray

Md Ray

Member
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.
 
DonkeyPunchJr

DonkeyPunchJr

World’s Biggest Weeb
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.
 
Insane Metal

Insane Metal

Member
DonkeyPunchJr said:
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.
Click to expand...
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:
 
Last edited:
N

Nvzman

Member
Insane Metal said:
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:
Click to expand...
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.
 
Last edited:
winjer

winjer

Gold Member
Nvzman said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
.Xeno

.Xeno

Neo Member
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.
 
Bojji

Bojji

Gold Member
.Xeno said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Bojji

Bojji

Gold Member
winjer said:
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.
Click to expand...

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:

GHG said:
Looks like Leonidas Leonidas has been busy as well:

IfFEhnz.jpeg
Click to expand...

Fuck me, I was wrong...
 
Last edited:
Celcius

Celcius

°Temp. member
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.
 
Last edited:
Celcius

Celcius

°Temp. member
JohnnyFootball

JohnnyFootball

GerAlt-Right. Ciriously.
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.
 
Elog

Elog

Member
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.
 
DonkeyPunchJr

DonkeyPunchJr

World’s Biggest Weeb
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!!!”
 
winjer

winjer

Gold Member
JohnnyFootball said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Celcius

Celcius

°Temp. member
DonkeyPunchJr said:
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!!!”
Click to expand...
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.
 
marquimvfs

marquimvfs

Member
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.
 
StereoVsn

StereoVsn

Member
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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