Intel Core Ultra 5 245K review

pcgamer.com:

The launch of Arrow Lake marks a new chapter in Intel's history as it's essentially the first desktop processor in its ranks that isn't made by Team Blue itself. The multiple tile design, first introduced with Meteor Lake in the mobile sector, is predominantly manufactured by TSMC—only the base tile and packaging are handled by Intel.

That's not the only change on show here and we've covered the important changes in detail elsewhere. It's suffice to say that the new Core Ultra 200S series of CPUs is a new world for Intel as they are so different to previous desktop designs.

The Core Ultra 5 245K (and the GPU-less 245KF) is currently the baby of the Arrow Lake line-up and it's basically a Core Ultra 9 285K with two P-cores and eight E-cores disabled. The clocks are a little lower too and there's less L3 cache, all of which reduces the maximum power limit to 159 W.

While it's an obvious successor to the Core i5 14600K, the 245K's $309 MSRP puts it closer to the Ryzen 7 9700X than the Ryzen 5 9600X (currently $249 and $327 on Amazon, respectively). Architecturally, though, it's very different to both as AMD's chips are six/eight-core processors, with support for 16 threads, whereas the Arrow Lake chip has 14 cores, 14 threads.

One further processor that the Core Ultra 5 245K is close to price-wise is the Core i7 14700K. That 20-core chip can be picked for around $50 more than the new Arrow Lake, just 14% more expensive but with twice as many threads on offer.

Whether any of these processors are worth buying naturally depends almost entirely on how well they perform in a variety of scenarios, so let's begin with an examination of the Core Ultra 5 245's gaming chops, tested at 1080p with a GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card.

If you've already seen the gaming results for the Core Ultra 9 285K, then the above figures shouldn't come as any surprise. While the 245K is on par with the 14600K in Homeworld 3 and Metro Exodus, it is noticeably worse in all the other game tests—15%