Core Ultra 7 270K Plus & Ultra 5 250K Plus Review: Intel Boosts Cores, Clocks And Gaming
UL Procyon AI Machine Vision Benchmark
Let's take a look at how these processors do with the UL Procyon AI Computer Vision benchmark, running solely on the CPU cores using Integer precision. Though many mobile processors feature second or third generation NPUs, they just recently arrived for desktop processors. That said, Procyon AI's Computer Vision benchmark runs solely on the CPU cores here.
Procyon's computer vision benchmark doesn't leverage all of the cores available in these desktop processors and performance is also heavily impacted by cache bandwidth and latency. As you can see, the highest clocked AMD processors with single CCDs -- not the highest core count processors -- jump out in front. The new Core Ultra 200S Plus series processors easily dispatch their precessors, though.
Geekbench AI Machine Learning Benchmarks
The Geekbench AI benchmark provides a straightforward look at how well a device handles a variety of AI-assisted tasks. This quick and easy test gives you a numerical snapshot of a CPU, GPU, or NPU's ability to power through real-world machine learning workloads, factoring in both speed and accuracy. The higher the score, the better the device's AI chops, whether it's image recognition, object detection, or natural language processing.Results are presented for three levels of numerical precision: single precision or FP32, half precision or FP16, and quantized or INT8. All results that the benchmark provides are geomean scores from multiple runs of each test workload.
We see a similar performance trend (to Procyon AI) with Geekbench AI's CPU tests. The Core Ultra 200S Plus series outpace their predecessors, with the Core Ultra 7 270K outgunning the Core Ultra 9 285K, but the single-CCD, higher-clocked AMD parts finish at the top, with the ONNX and OpenVINO frameworks.
The Core Ultra 200S Plus and original Core Ultra 200 series processors also feature a Meteor Lake-class NPU. Once again we see the optimizations made with the new Core Ultra 200S Plus series pushing them ahead of the original Arrow Lake parts.
LAME XP Audio Encoding
In our custom LAME XP MP3 encoding test, we convert 24, large uncompressed WAV files to the MP3 format, which is a common use case for many end users, to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. The LAME engine is an open-source MP3 audio encoder that is used widely in a multitude of third party applications. For this test, we created 24-copies of our own 223MB WAV file (an 11 minute Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME XP tool. Processing times are recorded below, listed in minutes:seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance.
The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus takes the pole position in our custom audio encoding test, outpacing the Ultra 9 285K by about a second. The Core Ultra 5 250K also performs well, outrunning the 245K by a couple of seconds and crushing the 8-core Ryzen 9000 series processors.
Blackmagic RAW Video Processing Speed
The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that tests full-resolution Blackmagic RAW video decode performance. The tool can be used to evaluate the performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL on a GPU. We're reporting two results here, both using 8K resolution, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.
The Blackmagic Speed Test is heavily impacted by compute resources and memory bandwidth, and as such, the new Core Ultra 200S Plus series perform very well relative to the original Arrow Lake-based Core Ultra 200S series. The Core Ultra 7 270K once again leads the pack and the Core Ultra 5 250K punches well above its weight.
Puget Bench For Creators
PugetBench for creators is an excellent tool for evaluating the performance of a unmber of popular creator-focused applications. We’ve run two tests here, for Photoshop and Davinci Resolve. PugetBench for Photoshop automates a series of real-world tasks inside Adobe Photoshop to evaluate how well a system handles common creator workflows like opening/saving files, applying various filters, and manipulating high-resolution images. PugetBench for DaVinci Resolve runs directly inside Resolve and evaluates performance across a wide range of editing, color, and effects workloads Fusion tests to measure compositing and motion graphics performance and encoding / decoding tests using common codecs.
Adobe Photoshop, which is mostly single-threaded save for some filters and effects, clearly runs best on AMD's processors according to Puget Bench's workloads. The AMD processors we tested take the top spots, followed by the Core Ultra 200S Plus series processors. The more multi-threaded video-centric workloads in Davinci Resolve, however, tell a different story. With the Davinci Resolve test, the Core Ultra 200S Plus series processors performs very well; the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus scores another first place finish and the Core Ultra 5 250K is right in the mix with AMD's current flagship desktop CPUs.
Cinebench 2026 Rendering Benchmark
Cinebench 2026 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and can utilize any number of threads, which makes it an excellent gauge of computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graphs below.
Cinebench 2026 adds a new wrinkle to single-core / single-thread testing. Some cores, like those in AMD's Ryzen 9000 series, can process two threads simultaneously, so running only a single thread technically leaves resources unused in one of its cores. Intel's current generation processors, however, can manage only a single thread per core. With that in mind, Cinebench 2026 offers both single-thread and single-core benchmarks, alongside the multi-threaded test which will utilize ALL of the cores / threads available in a processor. Since Intel's current processors manage only a single thread per core, their single-core / single-thread results are identical in the graph above.
Once again we see the Core Ultra 200S Plus series performing very well. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus takes the top spot yet again and the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus trails only the 16-Core AMD processors and Core Ultra 9 285K.
POV-Ray CPU Ray Tracing Benchmark
POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit images. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.POV-Ray
Score another win for the Core Ultra 7 270K in POV-Ray. This benchmark tells essentially the same story as Cinebench, though the Core Ultra 9 285K jumps up a couple of rungs to outpace the AMD processors.
Corona 10 Render Benchmark
The Corona Benchmark is built on the Corona 10 rendering core and assesses system performance by rendering a scene using Corona 10. It determines the color of each pixel by sending rays into the scene and analyzing the materials, lights and other components and then shows a machine's performance in rays per second (rays/s), where higher values equal better performance.
The new Core Ultra 200S Plus series processors performed very well in the Corona 10 benchmark. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus puts up the best score of all the Intel processors and the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus continues to perform in-line with much higher priced processors.
Blender Rendering Benchmarks
Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, and animation to simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking. It has a purpose-built benchmarking tool that will track the time it takes to complete rendering a particular model (or models). We used the CPU-focused benchmark with all three models currently available...
The Core Ultra 200S Plus series processors also performed well in the latest Blender benchmark. The Core Ultra 7 270K trails only AMD's top-end Ryzen 9 9950X3D and the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus finishes well out in front of the older 245K and the 8-Core AMD processors.
Y-Cruncher Multi-Threaded Pi Calculator
Y-Cruncher is a multi-core-capable tool that calculates the value of pi to a specified number of digits. In this case, we ran the tool on all threads and had the application calculate the value of pi to 1 billion digits. The values below are the time required to perform the calculation expressed in seconds. As a result, lower values indicate better performance.
The Y-Cruncher benchmark once again has the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus outpacing all of the Intel processors and trailing only the Ryzen 9 processors and the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus splits the 8-core Ryzen processors, landing right in between the Ryzen 7 9700X and 9850X3D.
