Amazon has just slashed the price of our favourite Intel CPU for Prime Day, meaning you can now pick one up for just $264.99 in the US, or £259.99 in the UK. Those are both great prices for this 24-core CPU, which has a massive load of multi-threading power under its belt, as well as much-improved game performance compared to its predecessors.
Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus
$264.99 / £259.99
“The multi-core performance this $299 chip offers blows its rivals out of the water, with great single-thread chops to boot.” – Read our review.
Intel’s Arrow Lake architecture initially came in for a bit of a kicking. We liked its low power draw and multi-threaded performance, but its gaming pace was severely lacking, particularly when compared to AMD’s X3D chips. As such, we were really pleased when Intel’s Arrow Lake refresh massively improved Intel’s gaming performance, largely thanks to a big increase in the die-to-die interconnect frequency. This chip also offers a huge number of cores for a surprisingly low price, gaining it a place on our guide to buying the best CPU.
Speaking of price, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus initially launched for $299, but its actual pricing turned out to be much higher for its first few months, costing over $350. As such, this new price of $264.99 for Prime Day is a fantastic deal for the processing power on offer. An AMD CPU with 3D V-Cache will still be faster in games, but we found the 270K Plus is generally a fair bit quicker than AMD’s standard Zen 5 chips at equivalent pricing, as we found in our Ryzen 7 9700X vs 270K Plus feature.
What you really get with this Intel CPU, though, is multi-threaded power. It has eight P-Cores for performance, and 16 E-Cores designed for power-efficient multi-core operation – that’s the same core setup as the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K, which still goes for $459 and is slower in games than the 270K Plus, despite its higher clock speed, as it doesn’t have the Arrow Lake Refresh tweaks. The benefit of that core count is massive if you like to use your PC for heavily multi-threaded workloads, such as 3D rendering and video encoding.
Yes, the 9800X3D is faster in games, but it’s not far off being half the speed of the 270K Plus in Cinebench, as it still only has eight cores. If you want an all-purpose chip that can do it all, and the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is well out of your budget, the 270K Plus is a genuinely great option, particularly at this discount price.
There are a couple of factors to consider here, though. One is that you’ll need DDR5 memory for the 270K Plus, which is fine if you’re upgrading from an old DDR5 LGA1700 rig and you have some RAM already. However, if you’re still using DDR4 memory, DDR5 RAM prices are prohibitively expensive. The other consideration is that you’ll need an LGA1851 motherboard, and these are widely tipped to be going the way of the dodo when Intel releases its Nova Lake CPUs on the LGA1954 socket.
If you have the memory, and you’re not planning to upgrade for a while, though, this is a fantastic CPU for a bargain price if you’re a Prime member. If you need a board for it as well, then check out our guide to buying the best motherboard to find one that suits your needs and budget. You’ll need to act quick, though – Amazon says this deal will only be up until 26 June, while promotional stock lasts.
