Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus Battles Ryzen 9 9950X3D In Benchmark Leak
To our surprise, CES came and went without a roll out of Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake Refresh processors that it's hinted about in recent months, though on hindsight it's probably because it wanted Panther Lake to have the spotlight all to itself. Nevertheless, we're one day closer to an Arrow Lake Refresh launch, and also another leaked benchmark closer, this time featuring a Core Ultra 9 290K Plus SKU.
Previously, Intel's Core Ultra 7 270K Plus made an early appearance on Geekbench, giving us a peek the performance expectations for refresh. This time, it's a higher-end model with the same core configuration as the Core Ultra 9 285K (8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores), but with faster clock speeds and faster DDR5-7200 memory support (compared to DDR5-6400 on Arrow Lake).
Incidentally, the Geekbench listing shows the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus paired with 48GB of DDR5-8000 memory, which could be helping the scores above and beyond what the clock speed gains bring to the table. And speaking of clocks, the listing shows the base clock at 3.7GHz and boost clock at 5.8GHz, the latter of which is a 100MHz increase over the Core Ultra 9 285K.
Here are the results...
The chip scored 3,456 in the single-core test, and if that were to become the average, it would dethrone AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D at the top of Geekbench's collection of average single-core results, which currently leads the official pack at 3,397.
It's not a huge victory—just around 1.7%—but an impressive win all the same. It's also nearly 8% higher than the average score for the Core Ultra 9 285K.
The Core Ultra 9 290K Plus also posted a strong multi-core score of 24,610. That doesn't lead the pack—Geekbench has AMD's Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9985WX at the top of the chart with a score of 31,573—but it does beat the Ryzen 9 9950X3D (22,156) by 11% and the Core Ultra 9 285K (22,580) by 9%.
Weird Al Yankovic once sang It's All About the Pentiums, but for Arrow Lake Refresh, leaked Geekbench scores suggests that in the modern era, it's all about the clock speed (at least in this context).
