Core Ultra 7 270K Plus & Ultra 5 250K Plus Review: Intel Boosts Cores, Clocks And Gaming
| Intel Core Ultra 200S Plus Series: Core Ultra 7 270K Plus ($299), Core Ultra 5 250K Plus ($199) Intel's mid-model Arrow Lake refresh improves upon the original Core Ultra 200S processors in a number of meaningful ways to boost performance and value significantly.
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Intel's new Core Ultra 200S Plus series is officially launching today (on sale March 26) and we’ve got both of the new processors on hand for testing. There are actually three new chips coming with the Core Ultra 200S Plus series, previously referred to as the “Arrow Lake refresh”, but two of them have identical specs. The new family members include the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, the Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, and a Core Ultra 5 250KF Plus variant, which is identical to the standard 250K Plus, but without integrated graphics.
So, what’s the Plus all about? Well, Intel has tweaked or refined multiple aspects of its current desktop processor platform, from its interconnect speeds to its software and driver package, which ultimately boost performance and alter the value proposition. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ll detail the specific changes and talk about where these processors fit in Intel’s line-up in just a bit.
Although they are based on the same silicon as the originals, the Core Ultra 200S Plus series does have a few additional key features. One of the weaknesses of the original Core Ultra 200S series’ performance was related to its relatively modestly-clocked interconnect and uncore frequency. The D2D and NGU clocks of the original Core Ultra 200S processors can typically be overclocked significantly without negatively impacting stability, and doing so helps boost performance in some workloads. Intel realized this and released its own Core Ultra 200S Boost Mode that does exactly that—it cranks up interconnect clocks by over 1GHz. These new Core Ultra 200S plus series processors effectively formalize that boost mode, so it works right out of the box with no mods necessary. The Core Ultra 200S Plus series also offers official support for faster memory, to the tune of DDR5 at 7200MT/s where the originals peaked (without overclocking) at DDR5-6400.
How Does The Core Ultra 200S Plus Series Compare?
These latest processors drop into existing 800-series motherboards, provided the board has an updated UEFI to support them. There aren't any new chipsets on the way, although there are some new motherboards coming just to refresh the entire platform a bit heading into the second half of the year.
Compared to the extant Core Ultra 7 265K, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus gains an extra E-core cluster (four additional cores) and a massive 900MHz bump to its Die-to-Die (D2D) interconnect frequency. Compared to the Core Ultra 5 245K, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus also gets another E-core cluster and the same 900MHz D2D bump, but it also gains 100MHz of max P-core boost.
There are software optimizations at play as well. Intel's new Binary Optimization Tool is an interesting piece of software that detects slow code in applications running on the chip and replaces the functions in memory with ones that are better optimized for Intel’s architecture, making use of advanced SIMD instructions that the app wasn't originally compiled for.
Intel specifically phrases it as detecting games and applications that are "optimized for competitor or console CPUs”. In other words, game developers often optimize for AMD and Arm processors, since they’re most prevalent in game consoles and handheld mobile devices at this point in time, so Intel "hacks" the apps in memory and overwrites some commands to better utilize its chips. Note however, there are no changes made to binary files on disk. All of the modifications are done live, in memory, with code replacements created by Intel engineers running advanced profiling on un-optimized applications. Only certain games and applications are supported for now, but Intel says it plans to expand the program.
Intel has also updated its Application Performance Optimization tool (APO), and hardware-based profile optimizations as well. APO is an app that tweaks policy within the Intel Dynamic Tuning Technology (DTT) framework to dynamically tweak application resources for maximum performance. APO targets games exclusively, and it will modify thread count and direct workloads to the best performing cores, to ensure optimal performance. Meanwhile hardware-based profile-guided optimization, or HWPGO, leverages hardware performance monitoring counters inside the processors to dynamically determine an optimal performance profile for a particular workload.
All of this falls under Intel’s Innovation Platform Framework and will be enabled on the platform provided it has been updated the necessary UEFI and firmware and that Intel’s Platform Performance Package software is installed. The new IPPP enables frameworks like Intel DTT and Intel IPF, adds user interfaces for Intel APO and the Binary Optimization Tool, and provides OS-level processor power management settings. Previously, multiple downloads and installers were required for all of Intel’s various platform software, but all of them are being combined into a single “one-click” installer to ease installation moving forward.
Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus And Ultra 5 250K Plus CPU-Z Details
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus (Top), Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus (Bottom)
All of the CPU-Z details for the new Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Ultra 7 270K Plus processors we'll be testing here today are outlined in the images above. Both of the processors are based on the same stepping / revision, which also happens to be the same as the original Arrow Lake-based Core Ultra 200S series. They also share the same 125W base TDP rating, although at PL2, power can peak up to 250W on the Ultra 7 270K or 159W on the Ultra 5 250K—or even higher, depending on the motherboard's UEFI configuration and the cooler in use.
The chips differ in terms of their clocks and core counts (and cache) but are based on the same design. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus features 36MB of Intel Smart Cache, 8 P-Cores and 16 E-Cores, with support for 24 thread in total. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus has 30MB of Smart Cache, 6 P-Cores and 12 E-Cores, with support for 18 total threads.
And with all of that covered, let's lake a look at how these things perform, shall we?
