This deal has sold out. The best price currently on the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is $210 at Newegg.
Pricing and Positioning
The Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is down to its lowest price ever, with Amazon slashing 34% off the list price to bring it down to $145. That's even cheaper than the lowest price we've seen on the Core Ultra 5 250KF. Despite being priced like an entry-level CPU, the 250K Plus ranks among our best CPUs for gaming.
The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus originally launched for $200, but it didn't take long for its recommended price to climb to $220. That's likely because it punches far above what its price would suggest, even at full MSRP. It, along with the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, was framed as a last-ditch effort to bring Arrow Lake to the masses after the failed launch of the original range.
Architecture and Specifications
The 18-core Core Ultra 5 250K Plus comes from Intel's Arrow Lake Refresh family. It sports a 5.3 GHz boost clock and six Lion Cove P-cores, alongside 12 Skymont E-cores.
The Ultra 5 250K Plus is an 18-core CPU with a split between six Lion Cove P-cores and 12 Skymont E-cores. As with all Arrow Lake CPUs, the 250K Plus doesn't have Hyper-Threading, but having 18C/18T isn't too shabby, with its AMD arch rival offering 6C/12T. The chip comes with a maximum boost clock of 5.3 GHz, and a PL1/PL2 power of 125W/250W. As it's an unlocked K-series processor, you can overclock the chip, though you'll need to pair it with a more pricey Z-series chipset.
Although we almost always recommend a Z-series chipset with a K-series SKU, there actually isn't a locked version of the 250K Plus. Further, many of the OC improvements are baked into the chip, including a 900 MHz bump in die-to-die frequency and a 400 MHz increase in memory fabric speed. Overclocking is a big upside, though it's not strictly required, especially when we're looking at a $145 CPU.
Performance and Benchmarks
Although the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is priced like an entry-level CPU, it performs much better than its current sales price would suggest, particularly in productivity workloads.
The 18 cores and threads help Intel's mid-ranger punch up in multithreaded performance. The chip is 33% faster in our multithreaded productivity geomean compared to AMD's competing Ryzen 7 9700X, despite Team Red's chip costing twice as much right now. Compared to the Ryzen 5 9600X that's in the same price bracket, Intel is a massive 80% ahead.
Intel's multithreaded performance here isn't a result of simply throwing a ton of weak cores at the problem. As you can see from our single-threaded rankings, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus came out ahead of every AMD offering we tested, including the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X. Last-gen's Core i9-14900K is slightly faster, though it also costs nearly three times as much.
Gaming is where Intel has started to take a backseat to AMD, and the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus slips some rankings. On average, the chip is about as fast as the Core i5-14600K. That's marginally faster than the Ryzen 5 9600X and about 3% behind the Ryzen 7 9700X. AMD's Ryzen 5 7600X3D is about 10% faster, though in this current Core Ultra 5 250K Plus sale, Intel's CPU is about $100 cheaper.
At under $150, just getting a competent CPU is tough, and the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is more than competent.
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