Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus CPU Review - Shaking up the entry-level

TweakTown Rating: 90%

Our Verdict

The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus offers superb value for money. It puts pressure on AMD with excellent performance in apps, though, it's gaming gains are not enough to completely impress.

Pros

• Strong multi-threading performance
• Excellent value at $199
• Integrated graphics performance
• Feature-rich platform
• Easy cooling requirements

Cons

• Gaming is still a relative weakness
• Lack of LGA 1851 upgrade incentive

Should you buy it?

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Introduction, Specifications and Pricing

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When we reviewed the Intel Core Ultra 5 245K back in October 2024, we were quite underwhelmed. Though its multithreading performance was very good for a product at its price point, its gaming performance was disappointing. Now, it's time for a refresh. Will the Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus impress us as much as its big brother, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, did?

The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is based on the Arrow Lake Refresh architecture. Its goal is to address bottlenecks from the original Arrow Lake. It features hardware tweaks and a new software suite that work in conjunction to maximize performance. Essentially, it's an optimized 245K that also benefits from four additional E-cores.

As the 250K Plus is based on the same fundamentals as the 245K, we'll skip over a deep dive into the architecture. Do check out our Core Ultra 5 245K review for a deeper analysis of what makes Arrow Lake tick.

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The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus features a disaggregated tile-based design. It includes four primary tiles: a Compute tile, an SoC tile, a Graphics tile, and an I/O tile. There's also a Foveros base tile that serves as an interposer, linking the tiles to each other and the base package and socket pads.

We'll have to wait for the next-generation Nova Lake architecture for a complete redesign. Instead, the goal of the Plus series is to introduce targeted improvements to reduce bottlenecks. The 245K is certain to remain in the market for at least the short term, but the 250K Plus is essentially its replacement.

The biggest headline change for the 250K Plus over the 245K is an increase in E-core count from 8 to 12. With the addition of more cores, there's additional L2 and L3 cache. It also adds a small 100MHz boost clock increase for the P-cores. That's an incremental update. But aside from that, there's a 900MHz increase in die-to-die frequency and a 400MHz increase in the memory controller clock, with support for DDR5-7200MHz memory. Also new is support for four-rank CUDIMM memory (CQDIMM). Which means up to 128GB per channel. A 2x128 GB kit is sure to be pricey!

Hardware tweaks are one thing, but Intel is very keen to promote its so-called Post Silicon Performance Optimization. It has introduced the Intel Platform Performance Package, Intel Application Optimization, and Intel Binary Optimization tools. I'll go into those in more detail a little later in this article.

I'll start with the hardware side of things. The Core Ultra 7 250K Plus is a 6P-12E core design comprising 6 Lion Cove P-cores and 12 Skymont E-cores. The 250K Plus maintains a 159W Maximum Turbo Power and 125W Processor Base Power. That's the same as the 245K. Its P-cores have a 4.2GHz base clock and a 5.3GHz boost clock. The E-cores have a 3.3GHz base clock and a 4.6GHz boost clock. The E-core base clock is actually 300MHz lower than the 245K's E-cores, indicating Intel had to compromise a little in order to avoid an unwelcome TDP increase.

The P-cores include their own dedicated 3MB of L2 cache, while each of the three E-core clusters shares a 4MB L2 cache. The P-cores and E-core clusters share a common L3 cache totalling 30MB. The total L2 and L3 cache is 60MB. The 250K Plus features a 13 TOPS NPU, the same as that of the 245K. Integrated graphics is provided by an Xe-LPG tile with 4 Xe cores. It includes HEVC and AV1 encode/decode support, as well as DirectX 12 Ultimate.

The 250K Plus is built with a mix of processes, including TSMC's N3B process for the compute tile, N5P for the graphics tile, N6 for the SoC and I/O tiles, and Intel's 16 process for the Foveros base tile. Intel describes the 270K Plus and 250K Plus as having unspecified process improvements, which typically occur over the life of a maturing process.

The Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus MSRP is $199, which makes it very appealing from a value perspective and puts a lot of pressure on AMD to lower the prices of chips like the Ryzen 7 9700X.

Best Deals: Intel Core Ultra 5 245K Desktop Processor

	Today	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$189.99 USD	$197.59 USD	$199.89 USD	Buy
	$189.99 USD	-	$199.99 USD	Buy
	$189.99 USD	$197.59 USD	$199.89 USD	Buy
	$254.99 CAD	$289.99 CAD	$289.99 CAD	Buy
	£134.99	£149.99	-	Buy
	$189.99 USD	$197.59 USD	$199.89 USD	Buy
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* Prices last scanned 5/15/2026 at 11:12 am CDT - prices may be inaccurate. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. We earn affiliate commission from any Newegg or PCCG sales.

Arrow Lake Plus

Hardware Tweaks

The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus brings several hardware improvements over the 245K. Aside from the aforementioned increase in E-core count from 8 to 12, the L3 cache has increased from 24MB for the 245K to 30MB for the 250K Plus. These improvements will obviously add to multithreaded and gaming performance. All P-cores and E-cores are connected via a ring-bus interconnect, which provides all cores with access to the 30MB of L3 cache.

As mentioned in the introduction, the 250K Plus features a die-to-die clock speed increase of 900MHz. The faster inter-die bus aims to reduce system latency and improve gaming performance, which was the original Arrow Lake family's biggest weakness. Intel isn't boasting about the gaming performance of the 250K Plus as much as it is with the 270K Plus, instead comparing its superior multithreading performance with the similarly priced 9600X, while matching it in gaming.

Along with four-rank CQDIMM memory support, the 270K adds support for JEDEC standard DDR5-7200 CUDIMM memory. Though such speeds are easily achievable on most motherboards, official support is always a nice thing to have.

Software Optimizations - Intel knows its own CPUs

There's no doubt that big.LITTLE core architectures add a layer of complexity and are better suited to low-power devices than to high-performance PCs. There's a valid argument in favour of having fewer high-performance full-fat cores (e.g., Zen 5) over lots of little ones. But power efficiency and multi-threading performance are important too. The key is to optimize and find the right balance between big and little cores. With that in mind, Intel has gone all-in on a suite of software tools that aim to better optimize app-specific workflows, schedule threads efficiently, and integrate various firmware interfaces and libraries into one app so they run more efficiently on Intel's mix of P-cores and E-cores.

Intel calls it the Intel Platform Performance Package. It's a single installer that integrates four different applications into one. The first three are the Processor Power Management (PPM), Intel Dynamic Tuning Technology (DTT), and Innovation Platform Framework (IPF). These packages dynamically adjust thread scheduling, power states, and clock speeds. They work alongside IPF, which functions as the firmware to the OS interface.

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More interesting are the Intel Application Optimization (APO) and Intel Binary Optimization tools. APO is designed to efficiently schedule and allocate threads to the optimal core type. It works on a per-application basis and requires Intel to provide support for individual apps.

The Binary Optimization Tool takes supported applications and optimizes them for Intel's x86 compute pipeline. It can restructure code and function calls on the fly to improve IPC. It's a work in progress for now, and it's an opt-in feature. So far, there are 12 supported game titles, including Assassin's Creed Mirage, Far Cry 6, Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail, and Hogwarts Legacy.

We'll have a look at APO and the Binary Optimization tool in a separate article in the near future.

Intel expects this app to grow in significance in the future. It also says there's no AI involved at any point. Another particularly important point is that Intel is not yet committing to backporting the tool to first-generation Arrow Lake, citing architectural dependencies that make backporting difficult.

My take on this is that free performance is a good thing. Intel clearly isn't relying on Microsoft to optimize for its architectures, and why would it? Microsoft has enough on its plate with basic functionality fixes. They should get Windows working properly first before focusing on optimizations. I'm also pleased Intel has incorporated its product suite into a single app. I didn't see anything notable, such as RAM hogging, and it seems to function more like driver-level software.

The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Test System

Core Ultra 5 250K Plus

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Our test CPU arrived in non-retail packaging. The picture above, provided by Intel, shows the packaging you can expect when you buy a Core Ultra 5 250K Plus.

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The 250K Plus is drop-in compatible with LGA 1851 motherboards with 800-series chipsets after a BIOS update. All manufacturers should have supporting BIOSes ready for download. Do buy one with a BIOS flashback feature if you don't already have access to an Arrow Lake CPU!

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The backside offers 1851 pads. Compared to LGA 1700 chips, the pad area of LGA 1851 CPUs occupies some of the space formerly occupied by the CPU's center.

Test System

• Motherboard: MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk WiFi - Buy from Amazon
• GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X - Buy from Amazon
• RAM: G.Skill Trident Z Neo RGB 2x16GB DDR5-6000 CL30 - Buy from Amazon
• Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL360 Flux - Buy from Amazon
• OS Storage: Teamgroup T-Force Z540 2TB - Buy from Amazon
• Power Supply: Super Flower Leadex Titanium 850W - Buy from Amazon
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro - Buy from Amazon

Benchmarks - Rendering and Encoding

Cinebench 2024

Cinebench is a well-established rendering benchmark. It has two tests: a single-core workload that utilizes one thread, or 1T, and a multi-threaded test that uses all threads, or nT, of a tested CPU.

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Heavily threaded apps show off the 250K Plus at its best. Here, it beats the much more expensive 9900X! Its 1T score is respectable, too.

Blender

A rendering application like Blender is just one of many reasons a user will consider a high-core-count CPU. We use the Whitelands demo file and record how long it takes to render the image.

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Rendering performance is really strong for a $199 chip.

Handbrake

Handbrake is a simple-to-use video encoding and transcoding application. Here, we convert a 4K movie trailer to 1080p. The results below show the average FPS, where a higher result means the task will take less time to complete.

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It takes AMD's 16-core chips to beat the 250K Plus in this test, and it gets within touching distance of the much more power-hungry 14900K.

Benchmarks - File Compression and Memory Latency

7Zip

7Zip is a commonly used free file compression and decompression app. It's sensitive to changes in memory speed and latency, and scales with the number of CPU threads.

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As 7zip is sensitive to memory speeds, the extra E-cores, faster die-to-die communication, and ring bus put it a good step ahead of the 245K, though it still struggles here relative to the 12 and 16-core AMD chips.

AIDA64 Memory Latency

Memory latency is an area that's traditionally favored by monolithic designs. Intel and AMD have both moved to chiplet and tile architectures, which inevitably add some latency compared to traditional architectures. A nanosecond or two here or there isn't noticeable, but more significant margins, particularly when the memory is frequently accessed, will result in more undesirable and cumulative idle cycles.

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Though the 250K Plus shows lower latency versus the 245K, it's still a weakness of the Arrow Lake architecture relative to AMD. Intel has surely identified this as an area for improvement with its next-gen Nova Lake family.

Benchmarks - 3DMark

3DMark Time Spy Extreme

Time Spy Extreme has lost favor as a graphics benchmark in favor of Speed Way and Steel Nomad, but its CPU test is still a good measure of multi-core performance.

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Though a 3DMark CPU score is not particularly relevant in the grand scheme of things, the 250K Plus makes a big leap over the 245K! And it takes AMD's 16-core chips to beat it.

Benchmarks - Gaming

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is brutal on graphics cards, but when things like ray tracing are removed, it becomes more sensitive to CPU and memory performance differences.

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Here, our RTX 4070 Ti Super is still GPU bottlenecked at 1080p. It serves as an example of how virtually all modern CPUs are sufficient for gaming in graphically demanding scenarios. Only the mighty X3D chips get ahead here, even if only by a tiny amount.

Far Cry 6

Far Cry 6 is an example of a game that exhibits CPU bottlenecking with powerful graphics cards.

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Far Cry 6 isn't a strong title for the 250K Plus; however, it is listed as a game that is supported by Intel's Binary Optimization tool, so it'll make for an interesting test in a follow-up article.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn can achieve high frame rates with powerful graphics cards when using the 'Favor Performance' preset.

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This is the weakest of the games we tested for the 250K Plus. It's a decent step up over the 245K, but AMD is well ahead here, especially the X3D chips.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus received an update that improved DLSS support, enhanced ray tracing features, and variable rate shading, among other things. Still, with a powerful graphics card, it is affected by CPU and memory performance at 1080p, though less so with a card like the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

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I was a little surprised by this result, as the 250K Plus did quite poorly. It could be a target title for Intel's Binary Optimization tool.

F1 22

F1 22 isn't particularly demanding, and it doesn't require a high-end graphics card to achieve smooth frame rates. We tested at 1080p with high settings.

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This is a better result for the 250K Plus. Only the X3D chips pull ahead here.

Benchmarks - Power Consumption and Temperatures

Power

The 250K Plus has a base power level of 125W and a Maximum Turbo Power of 159W. A Cinebench looping test showed the 250K Plus peaking just over that limit at 164W. It's a step up from the 245K, but the 250K Plus definitely delivers very good performance per watt under heavily threaded loads.

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Temperatures

It goes without saying that temperature results heavily depend on your cooler's capabilities, case airflow, and ambient temperature. We aim to maintain a constant ambient temperature of 22 degrees Celsius for temperature testing.

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A peak temperature reading of 76 degrees is a good result. It is well within the capabilities of our 360m AIO. A decent 240mm AIO or air cooler won't have any problem keeping a 250K Plus under control.

Final Thoughts

The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is a solid improvement over the 245K. At $199, it offers excellent value. It's improved so much that AMD will have to rethink its pricing. It destroys the 9700X in multithreaded workloads, it has good performance per watt, and it has an NPU if that's something that matters to you.

Intel could have named the 250K Plus and 270K Plus the 345K and 365K, but after it received criticism for the incremental upgrades between the 12th and 14th Generation families, it has wisely adopted the Plus nomenclature. It says it's better at reflecting the ultimate version of an architecture, and we may see the Plus naming return for future generations.

While the 250K Plus is a strong chip under most scenarios, gaming remains a relative weakness. It has improved compared to the underwhelming 245K, but gaming performance can be overrated unless you have a powerful GPU and want to push hundreds of FPS in competitive shooters. Users looking for a budget CPU are not likely to own an RTX 5090. If you do, you'll surely be looking at an AMD X3D chip. Though you'll have to pay a lot more for one.

I'm quite intrigued by the attention Intel is putting on its software stack and optimization. It probably says more about Microsoft dropping the ball more than anything else! I'm interested to see how these tools progress. Intel is not going to abandon its E-core strategy any time soon.

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One downside of Arrow Lake is its one-and-done platform. LGA 1851 is a good socket, with PCIe 5.0 for GPUs and SSDs, WiFi 7, CUDIMM support, and technologies like USB4 and Thunderbolt. But AMD has those too (Thunderbolt not so much), and AM5 is expected to last at least one more generation. But with new technologies like DDR6 and PCIe 6.0 looking years away, at least a good 800-series motherboard with an Arrow Lake Plus chip will last you for several years.

Also worth noting is the strength of Arrow Lake's integrated graphics performance. As there is no change to the Xe-LPG tile, we did not test IGP performance. However, you can check our 245K review to see how it performs. 1080p with older titles is definitely doable, particularly if you add some XeSS to the mix.

The 250K Plus has several appealing facets. Its value for money is very good indeed, and it puts pressure on the likes of the Ryzen 7 9700X. It offers unbeatable application performance at this price, and its performance per watt is similarly very good, even if power consumption is higher than the 245K. It's an acceptable trade-off at this level.

Really, the only weakness is its gaming performance, which is better, but generally can't match AMD, particularly the mighty X3D chips. However, they are much more expensive, and buyers of the $199 250K Plus are unlikely to use $1000+ graphics cards.

The 250K Plus is a great chip for a general-purpose system and users who do a little of everything. If you're upgrading from an older system, you'll be impressed by the gains on offer and value when paired with a capable B860 motherboard.

I'm excited to see what Intel has up its sleeve for Nova Lake, as the 250K Plus and 270K Plus offer a real performance uplift without a fundamental architectural change.