[The Exiled]

Intel Core Ultra 200S: 104 Days Later - Final Review & Performance Insights

Intel's false start with Core Ultra 200S Arrow Lake has given AMD time to launch the Ryzen 7 9800X3D which has proven to be utterly dominant in the gaming market. The snag here is that while Intel has fixed a number of problems, mainly with Windows 11 24H2, the news about their relative weakness compared to AMD does not yet seem to have sunk in with the financial people. The result is that prices have remained high in the face of tragic sales and that hurts the prospects of the three CPUs that we have on review.

You can make the argument that Core Ultra 9 285K is a decent all-round CPU but once you factor in the cost of a Z890 motherboard and the latest CU-DIMMs the appeal pretty much evaporates. Thankfully the Core Ultra 7 265K delivers most of the benefits of Core Ultra 9 at two thirds the price, and that means we can just about recommend this CPU. We know full well that some people will only ever buy Intel and won't touch AMD and to that select group we say ‘Core Ultra 7 265K is for you.' Finally we have the Core Ultra 5 245K which is a junior processor that fails to deliver the budget performance we have come to expect from Core i5 in recent years. Gaming, in particular, was a real disappointment on the Core Ultra 5.