Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Review: Intel Throws a Lateral with Arrow Lake

Intel’s $589 Core Ultra 9 285K brings substantial gains in productivity workloads and drastically reduces power consumption; however, the new Arrow Lake chips struggle to keep up with their prior generation counterparts in gaming, making the chips more of a lateral move for performance enthusiasts.

Below, we have the geometric mean of our gaming test suite at 1080p and a cumulative measure of performance in single- and multi-threaded applications. These are cumulative measurements, so outliers in specific titles can impact the values. The Ryzen X3D chips use 3D V-Cache tech, which doesn’t accelerate all titles equally and comes with performance penalties in productivity applications. Be sure to check our individual game and productivity benchmarks in the preceding sections to make an informed decision based on your intended workloads.

We conducted our gaming tests with an Nvidia RTX 4090, so performance deltas will shrink with lesser cards and higher resolution and fidelity settings.

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Intel’s Arrow Lake platform still feels raw; we encountered a few odd characteristics during our testing, so it is possible that we could see at least slightly better performance in the future.

With Arrow Lake, Intel is transitioning to a chiplet-based design for desktop PCs for the first time, a process that AMD completed years ago. AMD notably encountered an almost unending number of odd performance issues in different types of software, particularly with games, when it first rolled out its then-new Zen architecture, and we expect that Intel could be facing some of those same challenges now. AMD worked with the software ecosystem rather quickly to optimize games and other software, but some of those efforts took years to come to fruition. However, given the scale of Intel’s user base, any needed adjustments might come along faster.

However, we don’t advise anyone to buy a processor based on what might happen in the future. Based on what we see now, it’s hard to recommend the Core Ultra 9 285K over competing processors.

The 285K’s gaming performance leaves the AMD X3D chips as the processors to beat for those that prize gaming performance above all else. AMD also has its next-gen Ryzen 9000X3D chips coming early next month, and they’ll undoubtedly ratchet gaming performance up another notch.

Meanwhile, the Ryzen 9 9950X runs neck-and-neck with the 285K in gaming while also offering a similarly well-balanced performance profile in productivity workloads. AMD recently reduced the 9950X’s pricing to increase the pressure on Arrow Lake, and its current positioning makes the chip a lot more attractive. The 9950X is also plenty competitive in terms of power consumption and cooling metrics (with the possible exception of idle power draw).

Intel’s own Core i9-14900K complicates matters further. At $445, this processor is a strong value for those seeking a solid blend of gaming and productivity performance. It will undoubtedly attract plenty of interest at $144 less than the new flagship.

Also, you should remember that the $354 Core i7-14700K is effectively the same as the 14900K in gaming for only a moderate trade-off in productivity workloads. With stiff competition from both AMD and Intel itself, the Core Ultra 9 285K needs a price adjustment.

It's not all bad news, however. Intel has been tuning its CPU designs for its own custom process nodes, and now for the first time in ages, we have Intel processors manufactured using a different company's process technology. The switch to TSMC may be part of the reason for a slight reduction in clock speeds and overall performance, but chiplet-based CPUs are undoubtedly the best path forward. The teething pains of Arrow Lake should make way for much improved future designs. And TSMC's N3B node combined with Intel's architectural designs has also resulted in healthy efficiency gains.

But we suspect few people that are looking to buy an 'enthusiast' processor are primarily concerned with efficiency. We also can't help but wonder how a future Intel CPU that incorporates a cache chiplet — similar to AMD's X3D line — might change the picture. That's a future potential, however, and right now Arrow Lake comes off as relatively uninspiring compared to the status quo.