Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus Review: They Did It

In an effort to drum up interest in the Core Ultra 200 series, Intel has released two new models, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus. In today's review, we focus on the more affordable 250K Plus, which carries an MSRP of just $200, putting it head to head with AMD's Ryzen 5 9600X.

Both are technically 6-core processors, but whereas the 9600X is a 6-core / 12-thread part, the 250K Plus features 6 P-cores and a hefty 12 E-cores, for a total of 18 threads. This should make it considerably more capable in core-heavy productivity tasks, and possibly one of the best value CPUs we have seen for these workloads.

So what exactly is the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, beyond the unnecessarily long name? This is not merely a refreshed part as we initially suspected, but an entirely new model based on ...