You might think the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is the best gaming CPU on the market,
but as of today, that all does not change.
But what if I told you that you could get 95%
of its performance for 60% of the price? That is what Intel has bequeathed upon the land
with their Ultra 7 270K Plus.
God, who is naming these things? Anyways, take a look at this.
In Cities Skylines 2, Intel's Ultra 7 270K Plus outpaces
both of their previous flagships and is nipping at the heels of the 9800X3D.
And what's even crazier is that the second chip that they announced,
the Ultra 5 250K Plus, is also a flagship killer.
It beats AMD's 9950X. That's a $650 CPU.
Oh, right, and I haven't even mentioned price. The 270K and the 250K are dropping
at a mere $300 and $200 respectively.
Prices that are actually lower than the launch prices of the CPUs they are meant to replace.
It's crazy, and moving into cyberpunk, the winning streak continues.
Intel's 270K Plus is on the podium, while the 250K Plus outperforms the 4900K
and the Ryzen 9950X. It just sits slightly underneath the 265K and 1% lows,
but it actually has an edge in average FPS. But AMD's chips also have an edge in average frame rates,
which is why I am again emphasizing the importance of 1% lows.
Those are what indicates a smoother gaming experience.
So what's the catch with these chips? Are they power hungry or unstable?
Is the price just too good to be true? It just might be.
But what is good and also true is this in-depth review
of Intel's newest CPUs and this segue to our sponsor.
Continuing with our 1080p gaming results, in F124 we see AMD's whole lineup fairing pretty well,
with the 9700X going above and beyond
and overtaking the 270K Plus and the i9-14900K.
The new 250K Plus trails the 9600X,
although not by much. But Intel's dominance is seriously challenged
in Counter-Strike 2, where their new high-end hotness only barely catches AMD's mid-range 9600X.
At least Intel's new CPUs are outperforming their own team, except for the 4900K.
When we take all of our gaming tests into consideration, it would seem that Intel has fulfilled
their marketing claim. The Ultra7 270K Plus is the fastest gaming CPU
Intel's ever built, even if it's not the fastest gaming CPU anyone's ever built.
Landing just 5% shy of AMD's 9800X3D and 1% lows
and 10% behind an average frame rate. But think of the price, the price!
And the 250K is also an excellent value.
It beats the 9600X by 5% to 10% or more,
depending on the game, whilst demanding a very small price premium.
But before you scream shill, let's address the elephant in the room and talk about why we didn't compare
these new Intel chips to AMD's 9850X3D.
They're more recent, fastest gaming CPU. Unfortunately, we can't test every CPU on the market,
so we opted to represent the 9800X3D instead of the 9850X3D,
because more of you guys are currently running it. And it's also very close in performance
to the 9850X3D. And if we're being entirely honest,
we did not expect Intel to compete at the very top of these performance charts.
You got me, Intel. But if you are looking for even more data,
keep an eye on lttlabs.com, where we are always adding new tests to compare.
So, what changes under the hood did Intel make to refresh their Aero Lake CPUs
and get these impressive results? Well, first off, they bomped up the clock's
all-core boost on the P&E cores, with the new processor source.
Sorry, they also tweaked uncore frequencies, uncore meaning everything that's not the cores,
and they've improved die-to-die performance and IO frequency,
meaning faster communication to the parts within the CPU
and to the other components in your system, which allowed them to support higher-speed memory.
Oh, right, and there's just plain more CPU. Both of these new chips bring in extra four e-cores
and some bonus shared cache along for the ride, which makes the naming of these CPUs really confusing.
Why does the Ultra7 270K Plus have the same number of cores as the Ultra9 285K?
And why is it performing better? Shouldn't the higher-number CPU be better?
I mean, at least the 250K Plus actually has fewer cores than the 265K,
so something makes sense there, but even there, in terms of performance,
the 250K Plus is looking more like a replacement for the 265K rather than the 245K.
So what are they thinking with these names?
It's tough to say, but the main thing Intel wants you to focus on is the Plus.
Apparently, this new convention is going to indicate that it's for enthusiasts until whatever you're paying
your marketing division, it is too much. And whatever you're paying your engineers, it ain't enough.
Onto productivity. Intel made some big claims in their announcement
about multi-core performance, saying that the 250K Plus has a 103% lead
over the 9600X. Yeah, let's see if that's true.
Jesus Christ! In Blender, the 250K Plus just pummels
AMD's price competitors, and at the high end, the 270K Plus is neck and neck with the 9950X.
In Cinebench, well, bow to your new multi-core king
as the 270K Plus tops the charts with his brother, Duke 250K Plus,
outperforming his counterparts. On the other hand, in single-core performance,
the higher boost on the 285K and 265K
keep them positioned above their plus-named heirs. If you're looking to decompress,
you can relax knowing that these new chips also perform well in 7-Zip,
even if they are a step below royalty. But in pretty much every workload,
the Plus CPUs are either fighting for the top spot or absolutely dominating in price to performance.
Except in Photoshop, where there is a clear platform preference for AMD, but outside of that,
Intel has stolen back the productivity crowd, especially considering price to performance.
So don't ignore them if you're doing any sort of productivity work in addition to your gaming.
Let's say this in a way Twitch streamers can understand. Intel is value-maxing and absolutely price-mogging AMD.
Well, that's crazy. After several generations of power-hungry CPUs,
Intel slayed the power efficiency dragon with Aero Lake, but CPU refreshes often result
in power consumption increases. So was that dragon really a hydra?
Well, in gaming, power usage on the 250K plus and 270K plus has increased by 10% or more
compared to their non-plus brethren. But on the whole, have a lower average
and a max power consumption than AMD's chips in F124.
And Intel's doing this while being pretty competitive in performance too.
In Cinebench, we can see that Intel is still happy to let their chips let loose with power
to really maximize performance, even if it comes at the cost of efficiency.
But still, Intel might make up the difference by having quite good idle power draw,
especially compared to AMD. And this well-managed power curve on the new chips
translates to a well-managed thermals on our Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360 millimeter
clad test benches. And even when drawing full power, they perform well under their rated max temp.
Remember, the TJ Maxx for these CPUs is 105 degrees
compared to AMD's 95. And the crazy thing is that if you really want
to push your chip, or if you're just like heinously thermally constrained,
Intel will let you set your temperature budget to 115 degrees Celsius and still honor the warranty.
That's awesome. Also kind of scary. It sounds great so far, yeah,
but there's still more to talk about. Intel has a few tricks up their sleeves
and it's in the form of software enhancements.
Yeah, we love that. The Intel Binary Optimization Tool, or IBOT,
is part of their application optimizer software and Intel considers this to be a core part
of their long-term performance strategy. Basically what it does is analyze the functions
being called by an application and redirects the call to a function that's better optimized for Intel hardware.
Intel wants to make it very clear that they're not changing the work that's being done or skipping any steps,
but it's kind of like switching from using a kit of different screwdrivers to a convenient
multi-bit screwdriver from lttstore.com. It does all the same work, just more efficiently
and sexier. Intel claims improvements as high as 20%
depending on the game when you're using IBOT, but we didn't see anything like that in our testing.
There's a clear uplift when compared against the baseline condition and Intel's current version of application optimization,
but it's nothing to write home about. For safety, we checked to see if IBOT
was increasing power consumption. It doesn't seem to, outside of maybe the added power
consumption of running your games that little bit faster. Performance is enhanced, but it's not by a lot
and IBOT can be a nuisance to enable in their utility.
And also like, it all depends if those programs that you use are being optimized, so who knows?
It could be a really big deal or just another unused setting in your driver software.
Oh, and bad news for all 349 of you who bought this generation of Intel CPUs.
Intel is making no promises on bringing these optimizations to their non-plus CPUs.
Bummer. This is some pretty new stuff, so let us know in the comments if you'd like to see
a more in-depth look at IBOT in an upcoming video. Just like Intel though, no promises.
Alrighty, let's talk about pricing. It's incredible, assuming that this pricing
will exist in the real world and that Intel isn't just taking a patron AMD's 9070 XT playbook.
599, XT 599, fake price, and hot.
My gut says that this pricing is too good to be true, but if it isn't, AMD will need to respond.
Whether that's by raising the performance bar with a generational refresh that actually does something,
looking at you the 9850X3D, or by slashing retail pricing of their current lineup,
or both. I just hope that these great prices and products
from Intel are not just here to score headlines in a time where no one can afford
to build a computer anyways. It's just so performative.
By the way, ladies, I've been getting really into Machalates and Claro.
What a talent. And I listen to, I know why the cagebird sings on Blinkist
because you know, I'm an ally. And also, I'm segueing to our sponsor.
Thanks for watching this video. Check out our review of the 9850X3D
to see more about the bestest CPUs in the game.