Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Ultra 5 250K Plus Review
Conclusion & Video Review
Conclusion
The Ultra 200S were the most contentious product of recent times in the OC3D offices. If you cared solely about performance then sure, they weren’t good enough. If, conversely, you could see that the route of the 12th > 13th > 14th > to ever faster but hotter and more power hungry options was untenable, then it was around the 14×00 performance but cooler and more efficiently. Thankfully this updated suite of Intel Core Ultra Plus products remove all debate. They are faster than the previous iteration. Intel have worked phenomenally hard to leverage all their expertise and overcome any deficiencies.
IBOT might not be a huge step forwards, but it is a step. What impresses us most is that there is any benefit at all given that it’s not a lossy approach. AMDs FSR technology, Nvidia’s DLSS and Intel’s own XeSS are all ways of gaining performance by losing pixels and gaining them back artificially. And they only work in games. Intel Binary Optimisation Tool takes a different approach by improving all x86 instruction sets, and so the benefits not only come without losing any information, but also work in all scenarios. Every journey begins with a single step, and this is genesis. One day we’ll look back, as we do with automatic turbo boosting or DLSS, and remember where we saw it first.
What has to be highlighted is the trickle down performance. A glance around the world leaves one with the impression that a) trickle down things don’t work, and b) if the consumer can be price-gouged, they will be. Intel could be forgiven if they pointed at the higher performance of the Plus CPUs and left the pricing where it was. Instead the Ultra 7 Plus has as many cores, and better performance, than the extant Ultra 9 285K. Just as the Ultra 5 Plus matches the old Ultra 7. We can’t wait to see what the new Ultra 9 Plus brings to the party if these are any indication.
The Intel Core Ultra Plus processors are what the original LGA1851 models should have been. More energy efficient than the models they replace, more affordable thanks to the “waterfalling” of core counts. Intel Binary Optimisation Tool improves performance in many applications and is supremely easy to install and access thanks to the unified Intel Platform Performance Package. What you end up with are processors which make their equivalently priced AMD Ryzen rivals in gaming, and crush them in creative tasks. Massive performance at a low price? Sign us up.
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