Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus review: The new best $200 CPU

Arrow Lake was defined by its efficiency, mainly compared to the power-hungry suite of Raptor Lake chips. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus pushes power demands up, but it’s proportional to performance. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is just as efficient as the 245K, and in some cases, it’s more efficient. That’s not what we saw with the 270K Plus, where much increased power demands led to less efficient performance.

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In a demanding all-core render via Cinebench 2024, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus demands 25% more power than the Core Ultra 5 245K. The situation is the same in Blender with a 26% jump. The increase is slightly less extreme in HandBrake, with the 250K Plus drawing between 18% and 21% more power depending on the codec used.

As we’ll get to shortly, this increase in power consumption comes with increased performance in equal measure. The more concerning metric is idle power. The 250K Plus posted the highest idle and active idle power out of our test pool. Although Intel has been defined by high power demands pre-Arrow Lake, Raptor Lake chips were able to maintain a low-power state in idle situations. Arrow Lake Refresh pushes the envelope on power, even when nothing is going on.

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Thankfully, increased power comes with better performance, allowing the Core Ultra 5 250K to come out with better efficiency than the 245K in Handbrake and Linpack, and match the 245K in Cinebench.

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Looking at the scatterplots (the lower-right corner is best for efficiency), you can see that Intel has maintained some of the efficiency gains it made with Arrow Lake. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is punching far above its weight class for the power it draws. It clearly beats all of its competitors in the same price bracket, and it maintains a decent level of efficiency in the process.

For all our power tests, we use a PMD2 monitor to capture power over the 24-pin ATX connector and 8-pin EPS cables. This hardware measurement gives us a more accurate view of power consumption, rather than relying on the approximations provided through software.

Test Setup

We use a nearly identical test bench across all the systems we test, short of the motherboard and, of course, CPU. You can see those test systems below, including the GPUs we use for games and applications, as well as the memory spec we use for each platform. Intel chips see some small upside with faster memory, so we stick with a 7200MT/s kit, while AMD chips are most comfortable at 6000MT/s.

In addition to the hardware, we make a few specific software adjustments. We obviously run with XMP/EXPO on for any given memory kit, and turn on Resizeable BAR and turn off VBS. We also disable automatic overclocking features that aren’t covered by the processor’s warranty, which includes AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive and Intel’s Extreme power preset.

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