The prices of two of our favourite CPUs have now hit rock bottom, as the acclaimed Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is now sitting pretty at just £249.99 on Amazon UK, while the 250K Plus now has an astonishingly low cost of just £178.49. These are fantastic deals for these chips, which are significantly faster in games than Intel’s previous Arrow Lake CPUs.
Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus
“The multi-core performance of this $299 chip offers blows its rivals out of the water, with great single-thread chops to boot.” Read our review.
That’s all thanks to some under-the-hood tweaks Intel has made to these Arrow Lake Refresh chips. A key one is that Intel has boosted the die-to-die interconnect speed by a massive 900MHz, which has a significant impact on gaming performance. Indeed, in our own testing, the 270K Plus was 12fps quicker in both Cyberpunk 2077 and F1 25 than the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K, despite the latter’s faster clock speed.
In fact, clock speed is the only ostensible advantage of the 285K over the 270K Plus – its P-Cores boost to 5.7GHz, compared to 5.5GHz on the 270K Plus. However, we found that the 270K Plus was generally a much better all-round CPU, thanks to Intel’s tuning. Importantly, it has exactly the same core count as the 285K (and the Core i9-14900K for that matter), with eight P-Cores and 16 E-Cores making for a huge total of 24 cores.
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus
“A compelling choice for creatives in search of an affordable multi-core powerhouse.” Read our review.
Likewise, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus has these same tweaks under the heatspreader, and while AMD’s X3D CPUs are still faster in games, the 250K Plus offers loads of multi-threaded power for its modest price. At its current cost of just £178.49, it undercuts the 8-core Ryzen 7 9700X by £66.50, and it has 18 cores (six P-Cores and 12 E-Cores) at its disposal for multi-threaded workloads.
As you can see in the table above, the 250K Plus isn’t far off being twice as fast as the Ryzen 5 9600X in Cinebench 26’s multi-threaded test, but it’s also well ahead of the 8-core Ryzen 7 9700X. Both these Intel chips really impressed us in our reviews, gaining them places on our guide to buying the best CPU.
Is there a catch? There is, sadly, and it’s the fact that you’ll need to both DDR5 memory and an LGA1851 motherboard for either of these CPUs. The former is now very expensive, and the latter will be obsolete shortly, as Intel’s forthcoming Nova Lake CPUs are expected to use a different socket.
If you already have some DDR5 RAM, though, perhaps from an old 12th-gen Intel system, and you don’t upgrade your CPU regularly, these prices are fantastic for the performance on offer. If you want to take advantage of these deals, get in quick before they expire on 7 October. You will need to be a Prime member, but you can sign up for a free trial if you’re eligible – check out our page all about Amazon Prime for more detail.
