As the price of DDR5 memory bites, it looks as though Amazon is having a hard time shifting stock of Intel Core Ultra 5 245KF chips. You can currently pick up this current-gen 14-core CPU for just £119.99, which is considerably less than half its £278.99 launch price just over a year ago. In fact, that’s a good £40 less than even an AMD Ryzen 5 7600. Amazon had already recently sliced down the price to just £139.99 last month, but it’s now dropped by another £20.
Intel Core Ultra 5 245KF
£278.99 £119.99
“The complete enthusiast solution, offering excellent performance in AI and content creation, powering an immersive gaming experience, and delivering landmark power reductions.” – Intel
That’s an extraordinarily low price for a 14-core CPU based on Intel’s latest Arrow Lake architecture. This chip gives you six P-Cores that can boost up to 5.2GHz, and you even get eight power-efficient E-Cores. There’s also a basic NPU integrated into this chip, giving you 13 TOPS of AI performance. As it’s an F model, there’s no GPU, but that won’t be a problem if you plan to pair it with a separate graphics card.
There are a couple of flies in the ointment. The most obvious one is that Intel Arrow Lake isn’t the best CPU architecture for gaming, as we found in our Core Ultra 9 285K review. The other is that this chip has no DDR4 controller, so, unlike Intel’s last-gen Raptor Lake CPUs, you have to use DDR5 RAM with it. That’s a bit of a problem when RAM prices are in complete turmoil.
However, if you’re lucky enough to already have some DDR5 sticks ready to go, and you’re looking for a cheap CPU upgrade, this is an absolute bargain. No, it can’t compete with an AMD Ryzen 5 7500X3D in gaming benchmarks, but you can still play games with it, and your GPU will still be the main limiting factor here. Importantly, if productivity is your top priority, this 14-core chip will be considerably quicker in multi-threaded software than a 6-core AMD Ryzen CPU.
Besides, at this price, these compromises are perfectly acceptable. £119.99 for a 14-core Intel CPU? That’s a genuine bargain if you can somehow find the memory to go with it.
