Intel has unveiled its new flagship desktop CPUs that are headed our way later this month. The chips are based on the Intel Arrow Lake architecture and the company says they are focused on performance per watt to run cooler and more efficiently than the previous 14th gen chips.
Arrow Lake is a big step for Intel. Not only are these chips the next-gen components with improved performance but they are also the first desktop chips to include built-in NPUs. So if you’re going to be doing all sorts of AI stuff, these NPUs are a big deal.
Intel says the Arrow Lake chips use significantly less power. This is great news as previous chips from the company became real wattage slogs requiring heavy power supplies and coolers to install. Intel claims the new Core Ultra 200S series now uses half the power consumption when doing basic desktop tasks and much less watts while gaming.
Intel’s general manager Josh Newman says:
“Arrow Lake will deliver Intel’s best performance for enthusiasts in desktop and mobile. It will deliver that performance at significantly lower power levels than previous generations of Intel enthusiast products, and Arrow Lake is also delivering the first Intel AI PC for enthusiasts in both the desktop and mobile performance space.”
Intel provided a few examples of these power-saving techniques. Warhammer: Space Marine 2 ran at 165W less on the new Ultra 9 285K compared to last gen’s 14900K. Other games such as Modern Warfare III, F1 24 and Total War: Pharaoh ran at up to 58W less. Assassin’s Creed Mirage dropped by 80W. All these games delivered similar or better performance on the new chip too.
In terms of thermals, Intel says the new Core Ultra 200S drops temperatures by around 13C compared to the 14900K at 1080p gaming with a 360mm AIO cooler. Speaking of coolers, keep in mind that the new Intel Core Ultra 200S chips use new sockets. So you’ll need to upgrade to a new board to use them. Your current cooler will work just fine, however. One board is the new ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 Hero which I unboxed yesterday ahead of my review later this month. Watch it below.
In terms of the chips themselves, the new Intel Core Ultra 200S series has been built using Intel’s latest 3D packaging technology. This has seen a reduction of 33% in package size compared to the 14th Gen chips. As a result, the flagship Ultra 9 285K will ship with 24 cores and 24 threads with a boost clock of 5.7GHz. On paper, these specs are lower than the 14900K. However, Intel says the chip is still 8% faster in single-thread tasks and 15% faster in multi-thread tasks.
The Ultra 9 285K has 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. There’s also 36MB L3 shared smart cache, 3MB of L2 per P-core (up from 2MB on 14th Gen), and 4MB of L2 per E-core. The chips have dropped hyperthreading in favour of power efficiency.
The move to a new LGA-1851 socket also comes with some advantages. Intel is supporting up to DDR5-6400 RAM and 48GB per DIMM with a max of 192GB capacity. Intel’s 800 series chipset also supports up to 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes, up to 8x SATA 3.0, and up to 32 USB 3.2 ports.
It supports a total of 48 PCIe lanes, with up to 20 of those being Gen 5 from the CPU. There’s also integrated Wi-Fi 6E and 1GbE, Bluetooth 5.3, and 2x Thunderbolt 4 on the CPU, with optional Wi-Fi 7 support through different manufacturers, up to 4x Thunderbolt 5 ports, 2.5GbE, and Bluetooth 5.4.
As for the options, Intel’s new chips come in five variants. The flagship Core Ultra 9 285K, a Core Ultra 7 265K and the Core Ultra 5 245K. Then there are the KF variants of the Ultra 7 265KF and Ultra 5 245KF without the built-in GPU. Prices start at $589 (285K) / $394 (265K) / $309 (245K) / $379 (265KF) / $294 (245KF). The chips are expected to launch on 24 October.
