Intel Core Ultra 270K and 250K Plus review: Conditionally great CPUs
Many of our graphics card reviews early last year and in the early 2020s focused on the difficulties of reviewing and recommending graphics cards when the manufacturer-suggested price points effectively didn't exist. Now, reviews ofany new PC component have to contend with the much more broadly awful market for consumer PC parts as AI data center-fueled demand for RAM and flash memory chips drives up prices for DDR5 kits, SSDs, and GPUs.
In our August 2025 system guide, 32GB of DDR5 and a decent 2TB SSD would run you less than $200. Today, you'd pay between three and four times as much for similar components.
This is the context that Intel's Core Ultra 200S Plus chips-the $199 Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and $299 Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, still codenamed Arrow Lake just like the originals-have launched into. They're solid performers, they're reasonably power-efficient, and for heavy multi-threaded workloads, they're a better value than what AMD can offer for the same price (though even years-old non-X3D AMD chips retain a small edge in games).