Meet Socket LGA1851
Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 5 245K will need to be paired with a brand new Intel Z890 motherboard, it’s not a drop in upgrade like in the past few generations of Intel CPUs. This means you will need to learn some new tricks when setting up your system. Many reviewers saw strange performance variations in their testing, and The FPS Review believes that this stems from Intel APO. Intel Application Performance Optimization is now enabled by default on the new platform, to help Windows out with scheduling, something it’s not great at. It requires a driver and can only have any impact on games that are aware of Intel APO, a list which is currently extremely short. This feature is similar to AMD’s PPM Provision File driver, 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer driver, and Core Parking enhancements, so enabling Intel’s version isn’t really cheating unless you also disable AMD’s features.
The power consumption is impressive, which was expected, The FPS Review ran Cinebench on their test system and saw the Core Ultra 9 285K 354W pull from the wall and hit 86C in Best Performance mode. The Core Ultra 5 245K pulled 235W, hitting 69C under the same conditions. The new series of CPUs boast interesting features, as does the Z890 motherboards, however the is one thing left to address.
The performance of these two chips in games cannot be described as great, instead you should expect an “inconsistent gaming experience, and degradation in gaming performance due to single-core/thread and frequency”. If you game exclusively then AMD or even older Intel chips are a far better choice. On the other hand if your computer works for a living, both the Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 5 245K are multithreaded monsters. Applications used for content creation, video rendering, and 3D rendering, for instance, will greatly benefit from the new processors and would be the only scenario where these new chips would be recommended.
