Intel Core Ultra 9 285K review

pcgamer.com:

The Intel Core Ultra 9 285, the current flagship CPU showcasing Intel's new Arrow Lake architecture marks the entry of a brave new world for Team Blue. A big slab of silicon, containing all the cores and sundry? Gone. Manufactured on the latest Intel process node? Also gone. Class-leading gaming performance? That's gone too, though Intel did say that would be the case.

In their place, you have the same use of chiplets/tiles that was first introduced with Meteor Lake. TSMC manufactures all of them, too, bar the base tile to which they're all attached. And quite remarkably, we now also have an Intel processor that uses less power than any equivalent AMD chip does in gaming.

We've already covered the architectural changes in detail, along with breaking down the new Core Ultra 200S range. For the moment, that comprises the Ultra 9 285K, the Ultra 7 265K and 265KF (no iGPU version), and the Ultra 5 245K and 245KF.

While halo products rarely sell in numbers anything like their mainstream counterparts, the 285K is going to appear in a lot of gaming and workstation pre-built PCs over the coming months.

It's also the measure of what Arrow Lake's full performance is like and I have no doubt that many people will use it to judge whether it's worth doing a full system upgrade, as Arrow Lake chips do, after all, use a new LGA1851 socket.

For testing the gaming performance of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, I used a ROG Maximus Z890 Hero motherboard, provided by Asus. The rest of the setup comprised 32 GB of Lexar DDR5-6000 CL32 RAM, an Asus Ryujin III 360 Extreme cooler, a Corsair MP700 Gen5 SSD, and a GeForce RTX 4070.

One important thing to note here is that all motherboard vendors have been working hard behind the scenes with BIOS releases, to improve performance, memory compatibility, and stability. I used two such updates from Asus but notably, there was no difference in how well everything ran.

While the above figures aren't terrible by any means, if one compares the average