15-05-2025
Intel Price Cut Makes Core Ultra 200 CPU Far More Competitive
Intel has slashed the prices of one of its latest-generation desktop processors, making it far more competitive with AMD's alternatives. The Core Ultra 7 265KF is now just $294 after a $100 price drop. That undercuts the comparable AMD Ryzen 9700X by a few dollars and makes it only a few dollars more expensive than the notably weaker Core Ultra 5 245KF. That probably means we'll soon see more price drops of Intel's other Core Ultra 200 chips in the near future.
When Intel launched its Core Ultra 200 "Arrow Lake" processors in the fall of 2024, they debuted to muted fanfare. Although the productivity performance was strong, especially since Intel had dropped Hyper-Threading support from its top chips for the first time in over a decade, gaming capabilities were decidedly lacklustre. Indeed, the top-tier 285K actually fell behind the last-generation 14900K in most games, and the rest of the stack was equally uninspiring. Comparable prices to AMD's top chips gave Team Red a significant advantage in mindshare and ultimately sales.
Credit: Amazon
But Intel is looking to secure at least a place as the value buy with this latest move. The 265KF is a powerful CPU for professional tasks, and decent for gaming too—just not as impressive as AMD's X3D counterparts. But now that the 265KF is cheaper than the 9700X, it's in a really interesting position. It offers comparable gaming performance to the AMD chip and much greater productivity performance. With its 20 total cores, it runs rings round the 9700X's mere eight in some applications, although in apps where you can't use those cores, the difference is less dramatic.
Intel's Core Ultra 200s also come with a capable onboard GPU and NPU. Credit: Intel
Another real standout success of this generation of Intel CPUs is the efficiency. Where Intel was criticized in previous generations for demanding too much power for too little gain, the Core Ultra 200 chips offer much more performance per watt. That's just the same for the 265KF, making it a good choice for leaner builds that want to run cool and quiet. Equally so, you can also dump a lot of extra power into chips like this to boost performance if you wish, making them quite versatile for anyone willing to do the tweaking.
Intel performance updates since the launch of the 200-series have also raised the bar for all new CPUs in the range, so don't judge them purely by your initial impressions from last year.
They also support the latest memory standards. New CUDIMM memory designs can run in excess of 8,000 MHz, and you will only find support for that on the Core Ultra 200 range of motherboards. AMD and older Intel CPUs will simply run at sub-XMP/EXPO speeds. In the right apps and settings, that faster memory support could be another great selling point for the 265KF.
Interested in other CPU deals this month? Here are the best prices on the latest chips we can find.
