Thank You for Trying, Intel - Core Ultra 285K & 245K Review

The video opens with a candid aim to balance positivity with honesty as Linus reviews Intel's Core Ultra 200S family, specifically the 285K and 245K. The host lays out the context: the new Arrow Lake architecture abandons SMT, uses a tile-based design, and introduces Xe graphics cores, while CPU performance in gaming is not meeting expectations set by rivals and prior generations. Early on, the reviewer contrasts Intel’s efficiency gains with AMD’s favorable power-performance balance, emphasizing that for pure gaming, Arrow Lake may not deliver the 5% uplift many gamers hoped for. The discussion then moves into concrete specifications, including core and thread counts, turbo behavior, and the different boost frequencies, setting the stage for deeper benchmarks across gaming and productivity workloads. By the end of the first segment, the video signals that despite some feature improvements, real-world gaming and productivity results do not convincingly outperform last-generation parts, and price positioning further challenges the value proposition. In the gaming performance section, the host reviews multiple titles and notes that the Core Ultra 285K often loses to last-gen CPUs or AMD options in both averages and 1% lows, with notable underperformance in several titles when compared to Ryzen 9 950X and 9700X. The 245K generally trails behind, sometimes significantly, in graph-heavy, multi-threaded games, which colors the overall gaming narrative as underwhelming relative to expectations. The video highlights a few bright spots where the 245K edges out some competing chips in specific tests, but those moments are isolated and do not flip the broader trend. The reviewer also reports a mixed outcome for OpenVINO/AI related tasks, where Intel’s NPU shows promise but relies on workloads that may not align with all users’ needs, further complicating the value story for gamers. The conclusion from gaming remains conservative: Arrow Lake provides some efficiency wins, but it does not establish a compelling gaming performance uplift against entrenched competition. In productivity and media workloads, the Core Ultra chips show a more nuanced picture. In applications like Blender and various encoding benchmarks, the 285K often sits behind high-end competition, yet there are pockets where the 245K demonstrates competitive or even superior performance in certain multi-threaded tasks. The AI and media accelerators provide noticeable gains in specific OpenVINO scenarios, but those gains are not universal across all workloads, and in many productivity tests the chips do not clearly outperform the previous generation. The host emphasizes that memory subsystem changes, DDR5 integration, and platform requirements (a new motherboard and RAM) complicate the upgrade path and diminish the overall appeal for existing builders. The video concludes that while there are some positive signals and potential future improvements, Arrow Lake represents a cautious reset rather than a slam-dunk upgrade, and pricing remains a sticking point when matched against AMD equivalents and Ryzen APUs. The closing segment summarizes the economic and strategic implications of Intel’s push with Arrow Lake. The host stresses that while the 245K shows some glimmers of efficiency and multi-threaded strength, the overall value proposition is weak given the price and platform upgrade requirements. Power and thermal behavior shows some reductions relative to earlier generations, but not enough to redefine the desktop segment, and the launch positioning leaves room for improvement in future iterations. The reviewer hints at a broader industry trend toward efficiency and suggests that this could be an early stage in a longer Intel recovery arc, contingent on better optimization and a more compelling gaming story. Viewers are left with a tempered takeaway: Arrow Lake introduces meaningful engineering changes, but consumers should temper expectations and consider the total cost of ownership when deciding between Intel and competing platforms.

Topics · technology · hardware · gaming · performance · cpu · power-efficiency · cpu-upgrades · consumer-electronics