Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

Review It's a tough time to be a PC enthusiast. Between the memory crunch and the AI boom driving up prices on storage, DDR5, and GPUs, it's gotten prohibitively expensive to build a PC.

Amid this turmoil, Intel hopes to win some goodwill from budget-conscious customers with its newly announced Core Ultra 200S Plus family of desktop processors.

The new chips boast higher core counts, more aggressive frequency curves, and, more importantly, are launching at much lower prices this time around. At $199 and $299 respectively, Intel's all-new Ultra 5 250K and Ultra 7 270K reflect a level of market awareness that we haven't seen from Chipzilla in quite a while.

Intel's Arrow Lake refresh is its most compelling value proposition in years. And, while the chips can't contend with AMD's cache-stacked X3D parts in gaming, they're significantly cheaper while also delivering ...